I had an amazing summer on NCS filled with trips to the seaside and eating lots of cake at the various social action events going on!

 

My summer kicked off with a week-long residential at Reach Outdoors down in Devon with 28 young people from the Cornwall area. The week started with a 4 hour drive to Newquay on the Sunday ready to stay in the Sunnyside Hotel so that I could be ready to meet the 4 members of staff and the young people bright and early on the Monday morning. After a 2 hour coach journey we arrived at Stoke Gabriel Football Club where we set up camp for the week in Bell Tents. The week saw the group take part in loads of fun activities; team building challenges, orienteering, coasteering, raft building, kayaking and climbing to name a few. The week was full of lots of laughter and involved me getting absolutely soaked when young people poured a large bucket of water over me during a water fight! Massive thank you to the wonderful staff members who were with me; Ben, Chloe, Catherine and Joe who are all still great friends of mine now and I can’t wait for lots of trips to Cornwall to visit them!

 

The following week consisted of recruiting young people to take part in the NCS programmes we had going out for the rest of the summer and getting young people ready for programmes in the following year.

 

The third week of the summer was where I got to see a team start their social action project in Cheltenham and find out more about their plans for the future. I then moved straight into visiting another team as they began their first night at Rencomb College for Phase 2, the night involved watching them prepare for their Time to Perform and watching a film. After a good night’s sleep I got to take part in day 2 with them where they spent more time on their Time to Perform and completed a couple of workshops; Town Planning and Bite the Ballot. The rest of the week involved more recruitment for the summer and visiting different Social Action projects throughout the week.

 

The fourth and fifth weeks again comprised of recruitment and visiting more Social Action projects, it was great to see everything that young people achieved. I also got the chance to go down to Reach Outdoors again for a day on each of the weeks to check how everything was going. Was great to be able to visit on the day young people were taking part in Archery and Bushcraft as it meant I got to make smores and get myself ready for the following week!

 

For the 6th week I was lucky enough to be asked to go down to Reach Outdoors again but this time as a Phase Leader for 60 young people and 8 staff from Gloucestershire. The sunshine made the week a lot of fun as I got to go and sit on a beach watching young people take part in kayaking and raft building. It was great being able to be part of the NCS family they felt was forming in their teams. A young person summed NCS perfectly during this week; “NCS has given me friends that I wouldn’t normally interact with”. The whole point of NCS is bringing people together from different backgrounds and it was great to see this in action. I’m excited to see what the rest of the programme holds for these young people and to see everything they achieve in weeks 3 and 4. Thanks again to the wonderful staff I had on this week who made everything fun and caused endless laughing fits on the field; Asha, Felix, Heather, Will, Lily, Erica, Liv and Rachel!

 

Now I’m back to planning and recruiting for Autumn and I’m excited for Graduation on the 15th September to see everyone again!