Appendicies

Project Evaluation

The following is a brief evaluation summary of the project for future reference and consideration.

What worked?

• Engaging youth and community stakeholders (project champions [partners]) to promote and engage to young people and to support and host the workshops activities. • Specifically covering each of the eight themes (and referring to associated prompts) separately as was able to attain relevant information to address each in the key findings. • Providing free food as a draw card and incentive. • Running workshops during school periods and within regularly scheduled group activities at their premises as ensured good participation numbers and reasonable level of commitment from young people. • Youth ‘champions’ who provided feedback on the Youth Survey to ensure it was appropriate and appealing to all youth ages. • Workshop model was reasonably flexible to suit varying time frames and times of day. • Facilitators moving around and sitting in on the discussions to listen to the context of subjects discussed and to specific open questions around the proposed themes.

What didn’t?

• Took way too long to prepare visual posters for activities – next time would use blank poster paper. • PowerPoint was not used – not that it didn’t work, rather the workshop activities did not need it . • After school workshops may need to be more active or use a different workshop format (more creative, physical activity, have fun incentive at end) as young people had been in school all day and were not necessarily wanting to be questioned and/or to provide input/ideas. • Club or group based activities, while effective, may benefit in being shortened to ensure those attending are also provided time for their interest-based activities. • Attempted to gain a number of youth champions from across the community to assist with promotion and support of the project.

Unfortunately this was difficult due to timing (Summer school holiday period) and on the ground capacity to promote and engage young people.

Suggestions for Improvement

• More time and resourcing would have supported the development of a diverse range of engagement activities and also not be restricted the delivery time of one week; potentially engaging and interesting more young people. • Providing a creative weekend activity as something for the young people to do and that had outcomes that contributed to the key findings. • Planning the project and in particular identifying youth champions was difficult based on the time frame of the Summer Holiday break and the start of the school year. May need to rethink time frame if to engage youth champions.