A huge thanks to everyone who came yesterday to our fabulous Garden Opening Event! And to 
Hey Smile Foundation, HCV Partnership & KCOM for funding the event and making it possible. The Johnny Whiteley Community Garden was officially opened by Rev Tony and Joan Whiteley and the community are loving it already. 

We had a BBQ, great weather and lots of laughs! 

Our fantastic Monday Meet & Eat session have put in so much hard work and effort over the last few months, alongside some amazing volunteers outside of Network, into getting the garden looking spick and span ready for the opening. They had so much fun and we're very impressed with the results. 

We had a great time during the Easter holidays running a Family Day for our Parent & Toddler group! They loved the healthy buffet we provided and the snack bunny went down a treat, ezpecially with the little ones!

Francois wore the young people out doing Easter hunts and hide and seek whilst the parents got to have some me time in our youth room doing tattoos, colouring and getting to have a chat. 

We gave everyone an Easter Egg to go home with at the end of the session and was glad to see how much fun everyone had had during the day. 

We're ecstatic to announce that we have been awarded the Advanced Level of the NYA Quality Mark. The NYA Quality Mark recognises high quality youth work through benchmarked standards and indicators based on the National Occupational Standards. The Award is a celebration and acknowledgment of how organisations demonstrate they achieve high standards of quality assessed against each indicator, and an opportunity to be externally validated for the excellent services to young people organisations provide using youth work methodology. The process of undertaking Quality Mark Award assessment is reflective and developmental and focuses on achieving better outcomes for young people by reviewing and refining youth work practice. 

Ayisja Smith, Youth and Community Worker,  said, "Working towards the NYA Quality Mark has enabled us to recognise our organisational strengths and areas for development. The process has supported us to develop reflectively and strategically in order to improve outcomes and relationships for young people. Throughout our time working with the NYA, we have been able to establish more effective ways of ensuring participation with young people and put in place new methods of listening to and acting on young people’s voices. We have seen a real change within our project throughout this process and plan to continue developing our practice using the recommendations from the NYA. We are exceptionally proud and honoured to have achieved the ‘Advanced Level’ of the NYA Quality Mark. We will be celebrating our achievements this week with the young people who access our project. Thank you to the NYA for their continued support – this has been an extremely beneficial experience for us that will be instrumental in our future endeavours.” 

Laura Keegan, Quality Practice Manager at NYA commented, “It has been exciting to award Hessle Road Network with the Advanced Level Quality Mark. This organisation works in the heart of the community and delivers fantastic youth work that closely meets the needs of the young people while also offering aspirational opportunities. Innovation is important to Hessle Road Network and this is demonstrated through their willingness to develop and grow their youth work practice, I was particularly impressed with how they embedded their Voice and Influence work. I had the fantastic opportunity to see first-hand the commitment and enthusiasm of the youth workers and the difference they are making to the lives of the young people they work with.” 

We will take pleasure in continuing to work to this high standard and aim even higher over the next three years to develop as a project for our community. 

Science Week has been such a whirlwind this year, but we're grateful to have been able to celebrate it with the young people and community in our building again! 

With the theme 'Growing' we were able to do so many activities and projects in each session. In the youth sessions we focused on Mindful Activities, made fidget toys, breathing boards, decorated our own journals, did yoga, put some breathing exercises to the test, and grew some beans in gloves and watched them grow over the week. 

In the community sessions we followed the theme of 'Growing old Disgracefully' and made soaps, hair masks, facial scrubs and hand moisturizer. 
And in our Parents and Toddler group we focused on how bodies grow and looked at tracking the children's heights and development over the year as an ongoing project. 

We also let a group of young people make their own Science Week videos that we've released during the week on YouTube and our social media. They loved the ones we made the year before and wanted to try it themselves; they found the experiments and then recorded them during their sessions ready for Science Week 2022. You can watch them here >> ​BSW2022 at Hessle Road Network: Day 1 - YouTube

We've been speaking to our young people about Breaking the Bias and not believing stereotypes about women this week, celebrating International Women's Day! We've made posters, spoken to our young people about a woman in their life that inspires them & made a display out of their answers, and gone over body c0nfidence with some of the older girls. 

We've been celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month at Network by teaching some of the young people about the different sexualities and gender identities that a lot of young people are beginning to talk about and identify as. We think that the more knowledge the young people have, the less likely they'll be to fall into harmful stereotypes and use language that they might not fully understand the impact of. It also means that if they or their friends ever identified as LGBTQ+ they'd be able to use terms and language to talk about it confidently and know that Network is a safe and accepting space for all. 

We've also discussed how different cultures and countries have had LGBTQ+ identities within them for centuries and how their terms and explanations differ from the Western ones we're used to, as well as discussed LGBTQ+ treatment over the years and how terms and definitions have shifted throughout time. The older young people we have in our sessions were quite engaged with this work as it isn't something that is commonly covered in schools or previous sessions and gave them a new perspective to think about. 

We've also recently added an extra session to our DA Awareness training at Venn and HYA around LGBTQ+ awareness and relationships.