by Matty Maslen, SPARK
Youth Leadership Training Residential
In February, PeaceJam UK hosted our first in-person Youth Leadership Training Weekend. We welcomed 13 members of our Youth Team, aged 14-26, to Bradford for three days of learning, creativity, and community building.
The PeaceJam UK Youth Team meets every month online, to discuss issue areas that members are passionate about. Together, we explore ways that members can create positive change in their own settings, be that at school, at home, or in their local community.
This year (academic year 2025/26), the topics our members are passionate about include:
- Youth involvement in politics
- Inadequate youth support services
- Mental Health impacts of social media
- Wellbeing in education
- Disability awareness
- Homelessness
- Impacts of AI
- Media misinformation
Over the course of three days, our members worked together to further develop their thinking on these issue areas into tangible Social Action Projects. With the help of facilitators, both internal to PeaceJam UK and external, they explored some key components of community-based social action.
We had the pleasure of hosting three incredible workshop leads:
- Lauren Kelly ran a zine-making workshop (google it!), demonstrating how creative communication can increase the accessibility of information on topics that can often seem overwhelming. Some of our members are now planning to include zine-making in their own social action projects as a way of sparking conversations and brining people together.
- Sudhir Selvaraj led us in a River of Life activity, shining light on the importance of making space for self-reflection when undertaking projects we care deeply about.
- Josie Tothill ran a workshop exploring how to bring people together for a common cause, using values as the foundation of community building.
A highlight for many of our Youth Team members was our trip to CATCH (Community Action to Create Hope) in Leeds. Here our young people found inspiration in the responsibility they saw the CATCH volunteer undertaking. Seeing young people, their own age and younger, responsible for looking after the space, the farm animals, and welcoming visitors like ourselves, reshaped for many of them what ‘youth empowerment’ and ‘youth-led’ can mean. As one of our Youth Team reflected: “young people can have an impact, and not just negatively”. When young people are able to claim agency, and are supported to enact meaningful change, the ripples are felt throughout the community.
Our Youth Leadership Training Weekend wasn’t full of traditional Leadership skills workshops. Yet our Youth Team reflected they were feeling more confident and capable to undertake their projects when they returned home. Through a focus on creativity, play, and fun, they presented ideas to the group, curated a space where they each felt supported to be vulnerable, and made genuine connections with each other. As one member said, “we’re a friendship group now”.
This was our first Youth Leadership Training Weekend, and from the feedback of those who joined us, we’re planning to make it a core part of our annual Youth Team. This year our meet-up was made possible by: the generosity of our workshop-leads volunteered their time and expertise; the University of Bradford and Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture for providing venues; Rotary Club of Jersey who funded travel for two of our attendees, and the Leeds Justice and Peace Commission’s SPARK Social Justice Projectwho made a donation towards catering costs.
