Participation in Practice: Young Partners Award Planning Group

Last year's awards were staged on 4 December and were organised by a group of 10 young people from NCVYS membership organisations. The group first met in London last August to discuss the type of event that they wanted to run. Mita Desai, 20, who was part of the planning group, says: "We basically brainstormed what we'd do if there were no barriers in terms of money or anything else and tried to think about what our perfect event would look like."

The group quickly decided that they wanted to put on a cabaret-style evening, which would include a sit-down meal. They also realised that while they were good at generating ideas, they lacked the necessary skills to run the event. "We fed this back to NCVYS and they got someone in to run event management training with us, which gave us the confidence we needed to plan the awards," says Mita.

NCVYS also set up an online forum so the planning group could easily share information outside of their monthly meetings. This allowed them to feed back information such as what they thought about possible venues.

The group booked the Lancaster Hotel in London for the event and arranged for a range of youth groups to perform. Young people were also recruited to undertake different tasks on the evening such as taking photos. More than 170 people attended the event, which was deemed a big success by NCVYS.

Mita says: "It was quite empowering to be at an event knowing that it had been completely run by young people," she says. "The event training I received was really useful as was the experience I gained from overseeing the communications side."