Riverland Skillin'It

The Riverland Skillin’ project aims to build foundation small business skills in a lead cohort of young people. The project will recruit and train a core squad of young people aged 18-26 to develop and deliver a small (pilot) knowledge bank of pre-recorded digital workshops and a mini-festival of knowledge sharing in the form of ‘live’ workshops (in person and/or digital dependent on changing COVID restrictions).

The structure of the project will provide wrap-around mentoring and support for every step of the project while leaving the decision making power in the hands of young people. This will include the renaming of the project.

The Riverland Skillin’ will take place in term 1 and 2 2021 with a number of workshops and events including a three day festival of workshops in July 2021. It aims to:

bring together and support a cohort of young adults to connect, inspire and empower each other
showcase and build momentum around a positive story of a youth-led project - to remind the community of the talent of young people living and working there
puts some real resources (i.e. cash) into the hands of young people.
develop the confidence and skills of local young people and connect them to mentors/champions/allies).

Project achievements

The Symposium (formerly Riverland Skillin’ It) nurtured a culture of skills and knowledge-sharing for young people in the Riverland.

The project allowed a cohort of 11 young people aged 18-26 to work with a dedicated mentor from January 2021 – August 2021 to:

Develop personal confidence, skills and networks.
Plan, design and produce a small digital resource to be included in a new online “knowledge library” managed by community initiative Part of Things.
Curate, plan and prepare a weekend festival of workshops aimed at other young people aged 18-26
Build trust and foundational relationships between young people and the Riverland's three local councils.

Commission creative responses to the weekend festival by young people aged 14-26

The festival was held in created by the young people was attended of up to 72 people. This included 41 young people from 18-26 from the Riverland area. The festival aimed to build a foundation of small business skills, creative skills and life skills through means of live workshops and was created by the young people in the project lead (the Instigators).

The Instigators were selected through a recruitment process and they created the festival with support from a project mentor. This Instigators did rewrite elements of the original project plan to better fit their skills, aspirations and needs of the young people. The Instigators developed their own group norms, set the vision for the festival outcome overall, co-created key evaluation measures, identified and approached festival presenters, developed back-end admin processes together and allocated tasks among themselves. In later stage of the project, they received additional support from a paid festival coordinator (aged 24) who brought additional event management skills/experience to their leadership learning. Over the festival weekend itself, the Instigators organised paid festival assistants (2 young people aged 16) to manage transitions between workshops, welcome attendees, give acknowledgements to country at the beginning of each workshop and do regular cleanings of the spaces used (for COVID safety).

Project outcomes

Outcome 1: Improve individual/community social and emotional wellbeing

The project provided a dedicated space with intensive and tailored mentoring for a core group of young people to connect with each other and explore their own ideas. This has been the primary outcome of the project as delivered with funding from DHS. The tailored nature of the mentoring provided has also enabled additional (paid and unpaid) opportunities for young people involved in the project to further develop their skills and networks through other projects.
The core cohort has formed tight bonds (adding to social and emotional wellbeing) through the challenges the project has presented. Of those attendees who completed the post-festival survey, 100% said that they made new connections attending Symposium.

Outcome 2: Improve individual/community economic wellbeing and resilience

The project overall, including provided paid hours/opportunities to young people involved to recognise the value of their time and labour. This has put real resources into their hands/pockets at a time when they've really needed that financial support, as well as the affirmation being paid provides.

Outcome 3: Reduce social isolation and increase the participation of priority groups in the local community

Young people are under-represented in leadership and decision making across the Riverland. This project has not solved that gap but is a positive step in developing relationships with the young people involved for the future. In particular, the workshop presented by Berri Barmera Deputy Mayor Ella Winnall was a highlight for many of the young people who attended and everyone who attended that particular workshop has requested further opportunities to engage with Ella and better understand how they can have a say on local government issues.

Outcome 4 - Improve digital inclusion as a tool to create social inclusion by facilitating digital access, digital literacy and digital enablement

All workshops and mentoring for this project have used a combination of in-person and digital engagement, including a dedicated Mighty Networks space and the use of GoogleDocs/GDrive. This was the first time most of the Instigators had used Mighty Networks and only two of the Instigators had previously used GoogleDocs/GDrive. The project mentor spent additional time with all Instigators specifically working with them on digital literacy and confidence to navigate these and other tools.

All of the Instigators now have familiarity with new digital tools and have been exposed to planning mechanisms for creating digital events - even though they ultimately decided to stay true to their vision for an in-person festival outcome, we discussed and explored digital options extensively throughout the project's development. Three of the Instigators also developed a digital resource for the Knowledge Hub, which involved translating ideas and skills into a format that would be accessible online.

The digital literacy element of the project was much more of a learning curve for all of the young people involved than expected. There is sometimes an expectation/assumption that "young people" are tech savvy and digitally literate and instead we found that the young people involved in this project needed lots of support to feel confident with new software and with navigating websites and online forms. The behind the scenes side of this project was a big learning curve for all of them.

Project evaluation

The evaluation for this project is ongoing. Anecdotal feedback from work completed to date has been collected from the Instigators themselves on the impact of the project overall on their confidence and skills. 100% of them report increased confidence, skills and desire to create more community impact.

100% of those who completed the festival weekend survey said that Symposium had a positive impact on them and that they learned something new and created new connections.

8 young people who attended the final festival weekend were commissioned to deliver a creative response. These responses include illustrations, blogs, paintings, animations and reviews. All of these responses will be shared on the Part of Things blog across October to extend the life of the project and share the success & learnings.

Updates about the project were shared on the Part of Things website and social media with some cross-sharing by council Facebook pages to a wider audience.

Ongoing learning and collaborations

This project has created new conversations and strengthened relationships between Part of Things, the Instigators and each of the three Riverland councils and this will continue to inform our next steps. None of the three Riverland councils have a dedicated youth development officer and/or ongoing youth development programs so the outcomes cannot be directly incorporated into existing services/programs, however Part of Things have agreed to continue developing the knowledge bank from Symposium as an ongoing community-led project.

Young people involved in the project and many who attended the festival have specifically asked for the weekend of workshops to become an annual thing. There are no ongoing resources to make this a reality, however, all partners will be exploring ways to support young people involved to present the workshops/similar workshops in other ways.

This project has received funding from the Department of Human Services Youth-led COVID-19 Recovery Grants and administered by the Local Government Association of South Australia.