Represent your YouShape Award

Before you begin

·       Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here.  Don’t forget to 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 if you’re short on helpers.

Setting up this activity

·       You may want to bring some photos, props, artwork or objects that you’ve explored so far throughout the YouShape Award to help inspire people.

Run the activity

1.     As a group, discuss how you want to represent your YouShape Award to other people.

2.     Remember to let young people decide how they want to help. Find ways to make what’s been explored in your YouShape experience so far, such as the roleplay, nature walk or Cardboard City, come to life for other people. You could make ideas come to life by thinking about how you could tell the wider Scout Group, your local community and the whole world.

3.     Remind everyone that people can do different things. Everyone should decide the best, most comfortable things for them to represent their YouShape Award experience. For them, this might mean drawing, writing a book, creating a collage, talking to someone, writing a letter, doing a community project, singing a song, putting on an event, or dancing. It should be whatever feels comfortable and achievable for them.

4.     How could you share what you’ve explored with the community? For example, if you had a post office, you could arrange a trip to your local sorting facility and write letters/pictures to send to a local care home.

5.    Listen and note down what everyone says, then get into small groups or pairs and bring the ideas of how you’ll represent the award to other people to life.

6.     Here are some ideas:

·       How could you share what you’ve explored or the skills you’ve learned with the community? For example, you could hold a session at a local care home, be involved in a project that uses skills you’ve learned or take part in a Scouts activity with young people who aren’t involved with Scouts.

·       Who could you show what you’ve made? Is there anything you’d like to ask them or let them teach you? What could they contribute? For example, if you made a cardboard city, could you invite parents, carers and siblings to come and roleplay with you or have a talk about the jobs they do that might take place in your city. You could also draw your city and share them with another section or even write to someone in your local town planning.

·       Is there a way you could teach other people what you’ve learned? Could you put on a quiz, open an art gallery or make leaflets? Why not put-up posters with facts on or take people on a tour of somewhere? Sharing things digitally is also a great way to represent what’s been explored and discovered.

·       Can you express your work with art? People could make a gift, paint a pot, make a community mural, create a collage in your meeting place or put together a scrapbook to show others.

·       Could you bring a friend to Scouts and help them to give it a go, run the session or help them learn something new?

·       How can you make a difference? Could you visit a local decision maker, tell them what you've learned or would like to change, and ask them to help support it in your area? 

·       Is there something in your local community that you’d like to support? You could gather donations for a charity shop, write cards to say thank you to an animal rescue centre or food bank and take them there, with drawings and letters to tell them why.