"To be given the platform to have OUR voices heard meant a lot"

MT shares the impact of being on our work experience placement for young people and how they were able to make “lifelong friends”.

I firstly want to take this opportunity to thank everyone at Social Action for Health for this amazing young people placement. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, learnt a lot and had the pleasure to meet and speak to other young people with a lot of knowledge, ideas and eagerness to learn. The placement was about 7 weeks long. I enjoyed every week. We worked on two important projects: the first project was dealing with trust regarding COVID-19 vaccination in Tower Hamlets and regarding the hesitancy that took part.

To start the project, we as young people had to share what trust meant to us and what it makes us think of. We did this through brainstorming the word trust. We came up with a lot of ideas and had time to break into smaller groups and discuss further using just a few words from the list we had come up with. Furthermore, we looked at people of trust, and fictional characters embodying trust. We went out and did outreach work and asked people of different communities (Bengali men, Somali women and Bengali women) about what they think of trust and who they trust whether real or fictional and had a few activities such as mind mapping on a Tower Hamlets map and what trust can be translated to in the map. As well as building a trustworthy character using arts and crafts, which I think made an impact. It made on impact on me as it gave me an insight into the different communities and their background.

The most important outcome is listening to these communities and what they had to say about trust, and we saw and heard the most amazing stories of these communities. Non judgementally and just focusing on their point of view, I believe many of these communities just wanted a platform to express their views just like us young people. In situations like these and placements and events like this you just realise that essentially, although humans differ, we have many similarities whether in the form of views, actions or manners. I loved exploring trust and hope many many more young people and people of all ages get to experience a placement like this.

The second part of the project was about important issues for us young people. We had many deep conversations about issues that we believe need to be addressed in Tower Hamlets such as:  Underrepresented communities, men’s health, women’s health and many others. These issues affected us and to be given the platform to have OUR voices heard meant a lot. I felt like we could have said anything and it was accepted without judgement from every single person at Social Action for Health.

We worked using the photovoice techniques which is literally giving voice to our picture. Or another way to see it giving the pictures we took a voice which is ours. We took pictures that summarised what health meant to us. Our pictures were personal to us and ranged from taking pictures of pollution, a word saying our choice, representing crime, mental health, trees, a mosque, garbage disposal, and buildings representing gentrification. Using these pictures, we then found 10 main themes and made posters that we presented in front of the CEO, trustees and people that work at Social Action for Health.

Ceri, Maharun, Polly, Dan, Rachel I truly felt like you listened to us throughout the placement so thank you and I really look forward to keep working with you. The young people that I met in this placement, it has been a pleasure to meet every single one of you and hope it’s not the end. I made lifelong friends from this placement truly. Amazing, grateful and contagiously kind young people that can achieve anything they put their minds to. Congratulations to all of the young people that graduated during this placement and to those still studying. Best of luck to every single one of you. To many more successes hopefully.

By MT