By Abeera Abdullah | Project Stand Up's Program Manager
Project Stand Up Youth Leadership Program
Project Report_GlobalGiving
February 2021
This is an update for our GlobalGiving Donors who have kindly supported our Youth Leadership Program (YLP) project.
What is YLP?
PSU has designed YLP to enable refugee youth living in Malaysia to become leaders in their community, through transformative peer to peer training. Using a human-centered design approach, YLP builds the soft skills of young refugees, boosting their capacities to identify and solve the challenges their communities face. YLP has been designed and is implemented by the Project Stand Up team, who are refugee youth themselves and aim to inspire youth to become change agents. With these unprecedented times, we decided to do our YLP program for the first time fully online!
What have we achieved since your donation?
We have successfully completed our YLP program’s first cohort in late October 2020. 8 youth participated in our YLP- 6 month-long program. We surveyed the members before and after the program and we have analyzed the data, which gave us some really promising results and confidence that our program works!
Based on the data collected, participants of the program showed improvements in all of the key areas of the program, including confidence, teamwork, communication, and leadership. Participants showed particular improvements in professional communication with 2 out of 3 members reporting improvements in their communication skills. Similarly, the members have also developed their teamwork skills, where every 1 out of 2 have stated they are now more capable of working with different aged people. This is an important skill to have, as it allows them to have professional communication with adults and youth.
After our first cohort graduated, we have designed our YLP program to suit online needs for the first time. We understand that in order to continue doing what we do, we need to adapt to the current circumstances of the pandemic like every institution conducting its work online. It is a challenge, but we managed to try it, and it worked!
We have done our first online workshop in January to understand better how to adapt our content and test our modules for an online format. We also have done live Q&A on our social media pages to promote YLP online program which will start in February 2021. Pictures below.
We have opened the applications for youth to apply and join our YLP program. Our team was busy recruiting and interviewing applicants that suit our program criteria. We are still in this process, we hope to start our pre-requisite phase in 3rd week of February 2021.
How have we been impacted by Covid-19?
Because of COVID-19 we are no longer able to meet in person. This has meant that we have had to move all of our work and our YLP program online. To do this we have had to test and adapt our modules for the program to make them suitable for an online format. Our online program will launch in February. We anticipate we will need to make changes and adapt as we learn more about what works well and does not work as we deliver the program over the year.
What are our next steps for YLP?
We are planning to start our second cohort of YLP in February. The program will be entirely online. Our aim is to have 30 youth participate in the program in 2021 and develop skills that will help them become change-makers in their community
What else does PSU do?
We are busy with other initiatives too. We run workshops on topics such as gender equity, empowerment, youth-adult partnerships, allyship with refugees ‘work with us, not for us’ and integration. We also attend webinars and write blogs to raise awareness on these topics. You can read our latest blogs here.
Our latest interview was with New Naratif a journalist on refugee education in Malaysia. Make sure to read their article to gain insights on different initiatives that are also creating more opportunities for the refugee youth in Malaysia.
Check us out on Instagram and Facebook to keep up to date on what we are doing. We also have a monthly newsletter where we share what we are getting up to, click the link below to subscribe!
Email: psu.champion@gmail.com
Social media pages: @project_ stand_ up
Links:
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