Hosting NCS - Saturday 16th November 2019

The Stall

Ealing Friends of the Earth hosted another group of young people undertaking the National Citizen Service (NCS) in October-November. NCS is a government backed programme which brings young people aged 15 to 17 from different backgrounds together for a common purpose. There are three sessions. The first is an introductory session which sets the 'challenge', the second is a follow up to monitor progress, and the final session which was held on 16th November is when they carry out their project.
 

Bulb Planting

The challenge we set them was to organise a face-to-face activity to tell people (especially young people) in Ealing about the climate change emergency, and then to organise a social media activity to tell people in Ealing about the climate change emergency.

The group was quite organised and cohesive. They decided for the face-to-face activity, to make a tree of some sort and ask the public to stick notes with suggestions to Ealing Council on what they could do about the climate change emergency. They also decided to make little credit sized cards with points about what individuals could do about the climate change emergency.

For the social media activity, they were talking about setting up an Ealing Friends of the Earth Instagram account and doing an Instagram campaign.

As the weather was forecast to be reasonable, it was arranged to meet in Walpole Park where they would put up a stall to work from.

The stall worked well. Several people came to see what they were doing and pinned notes on the tree that they had drawn, the students discussed climate change with a couple of people and also walked round the park handing out EFoE leaflets and their Eco-friendly checklist cards. At one point, the Ealing park ranger intervened as we hadn't applied for permission to put up the stall – but she was very positive and instead got the students involved in a planting bulbs project nearby.

Students, NCS Staff & EFoE members

 In the afternoon the social media project didn’t really take off as the student who has set up an Ealing Friends of the Earth Instagram account was absent and we couldn’t get the password for the account. Instead Nic and Caroline had a lesson on Instagram. When we get the password details we will go onto the account and put into practice what we have been taught.

For the future, NCS is changing its provider from The Challenge to other (mainly sports) organisations so it's not clear if EFoE will continue to have the opportunity to host NCS groups.