I hope you have all been well since our last blog, and enjoying the not-so-nice English weather!

Last Tuesday Poole Youth Forum hosted their annual youth conference - VOICE IT: A 'Positive for Youth Event'.

This year was bigger and better than ever, with more organisations coming along to support the day and do their own surveys, and more elected members to hear what young people have to say.

Young people completely took over the Civic Centre for the afternoon; 52 young people walking around the building came as a bit of a shock.

We promoted the Youth Conference in schools, youth clubs and on Facebook, and despite the rain we got a great turnout of young people, aged 12-20 from 10 different schools, who all wanted to have their say.

When the young people arrived they chose which of the three workshops they wanted to participate in, the workshops were: Employability, Volunteering, and Mental Health and Wellbeing.

The Youth Conference was then opened by the Mayor, who is very supportive of all the work of UKYP and Poole Youth Forum, and everyone got to work in their workshops.

I was involved in the Employability workshop, looking at how 'ready for work' young people are. The workshop was led by the Bournemouth and Poole 14-19 Team who support schools, colleges etc. in all aspects of education, including employment information.

During the workshop we looked at what skills and qualities employers look for and value in their employees, discussed our hopes and fears around getting a job, and did mock interviews to improve our interview technique.

We were interested to see how important qualities, such as enthusiasm, punctuality and reliability is rated in comparison to your qualifications. The mock interviews were really helpful as well as good fun.

We all felt it was something that all students should have the opportunity to practise in school, and be made aware of the key qualities employers look for, so that all young people are 'employable' and 'ready for work'.

In the Volunteering and Positive Activities workshop the group looked at what made a an ideal volunteer both from the volunteers and employers perspective then went on to come up with ideas and schemes to promote volunteering and positive activities in Poole.

One idea was to develop voluntary service schemes such as toys, books and school uniform banks which young people could volunteer to develop and run, which would also help out families that are finding it hard in the recession to meet costs.

Another idea was to create Graffiti Removal Teams who could be involved in replacing ugly graffiti with street art projects showing elements of Poole that young people in Poole are proud of.

However, everyone felt that they did not want volunteers to replace professionals but rather complement and enhance the delivery of services.

From the Mental Health and Wellbeing workshop the main messages were that mental health is a really important issue that is not addressed in PSHE lessons and should be, and that they really enjoyed the workshop and exploring issues that are normally swept under the carpet and ignored.

They felt that the majority of young people have issues that should be dealt with and discussed openly to support one another; it is not just the minority as is perceived.

Following the workshops, young people had the chance to look round the 'Market Place' - a number of organisations (such as youth clubs, Poole Housing Partnership and SPACE) had stalls to provide information and collect young people's opinions on a variety of issues.

I ran a stall myself to collect young people's opinions on the five topics which will be debated by UKYP in the House of Commons on Friday 4th November so that we can represent Poole's views on a national level.

I also collected young people's views on their school councils - what is good, and what could be improved. This will help us to create our School Councils' Charter which we will be drafting this month.

Whilst young people had the opportunity to look around the stalls, a few people from each workshop fed back the main messages from their discussions to the elected members who were there.

It was a great chance for young people to have their views directly heard by policy makers and acted upon.

Overall it was a fantastic afternoon with lots achieved. Young people had the chance to have a voice, and to have their voice heard, and with so many young people present, it showed everyone how much we want to be heard!