Create a positive post office

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help. 
• Discussions about feelings can sometimes lead to disclosures of harm. Always follow the Safeguarding Code of Conduct (Yellow Card) and report any concerns to the UK HQ Safeguarding Team.

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help. 
• Discussions about feelings can sometimes lead to disclosures of harm. Always follow the Safeguarding Code of Conduct (Yellow Card) and report any concerns to the UK HQ Safeguarding Team.

Planning and setting up this activity

• For this activity, everyone will need to contribute to making the postbox and you could use this as part of the Builder Activity Badge or Creative Activity Badge. It’s a good idea to decide how the group will create it before the session. For example, whether everyone will draw or paint directly on the box, or whether they'll create separate art pieces first and stick them on later.
• To help your young people write their messages, you could use the positive message sentence starters. These give ideas and makes it easier for everyone to create kind and thoughtful messages. 

Running this activity

1. Gather everyone together and explain that today they're going to make a positive postbox.
2. Tell the group that the postbox is for sending positive messages to each other. Positive messages are kind words that make people feel happy. They should help everyone feel good and included.
3. As a group, design and decorate the postbox. Everyone can help by drawing, colouring or painting something to make it bright and welcoming. People could decorate directly onto the box, or create designs on a separate piece of paper or card to be stuck on afterwards.
4. Give everyone a piece of paper.
5. As a group, decide how to choose who sends a message to whom. People could choose their own person, pull a name from a hat, be paired up, or write to the person sitting next to them. The messages can be signed by the person writing them or left anonymous, but whichever way is chosen should be used by the whole group.
6. Once everyone has written their messages, they can post them into the postbox.
7. After all the letters are in the box, adult volunteers should read each one to make sure all the messages are kind and that everyone has received at least one each. 
8. The messages can then be delivered (handed out) to each person. Everyone can choose whether to read their message out loud if they feel comfortable or keep it private. Messages can also be taken home.
9. As a group, you could decide to write to someone else in the local community, such as a care home, library, food bank or community group. You could create one positive poster or individual letters, which can be delivered after the session or on another week.
10. If possible, keep the postbox available at every session, along with pens and paper. Explain that it will always be there if anyone wants to send a message, whether it’s for a celebration, a special day or just everyday kindness.