Representatives from several Young People's Development Programme (YPDP) projects recently attended an NYA-led training event in Leeds to learn more about volunteering. The YPDP scheme, an innovative health programme for young people in England funded by the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills, is aimed at reducing risk-taking behaviour, and incorporates elements of volunteering. The Leeds event was directed at helping projects acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the forms volunteering can take, and how they can use it as a tool to make progress. One of the requirements of the YPDP programme is that between five and 10 per cent of contact time is branded as 'volunteering', but the message picked up by those leading the programme is that some projects are very confident about the volunteering aspect and others much less so.

"Some projects weren't sure what volunteering should look like," said active development officer Dave Phillips. "We therefore decided to provide a day for them to look in some detail at a contemporary version of young people's volunteering. We aimed to challenge the traditional notion of volunteering being stuffy and boring, and instead look more at how we see volunteering - project-based work, bite-sized opportunities and the idea of young people designing things for themselves. We got the projects thinking about how the work they were doing could be reframed and adapted."

Feedback on the day was extremely positive, with projects developing concrete and measurable action plans for future activities. "We asked people to think about what they'd do when they got back, practices they might set up or things they might do differently, and to set medium-term targets," adds Phillips. "People had a good time on the day and hopefully in a year's time they will be able to reflect and look back on some very positive changes."

The NYA's YPDP team hopes to offer more support to the projects' volunteering work over the course of 2005. Subject to appropriate funding, the next phase is likely to be field-based, cutting down on the restrictions implicit in one-day events.