By: Diya Deepu and Tina Liu
October 21, 2021
The Halton Youth Initiative is made up of a number of groups. The Knowledge Mobilizers team is one of the groups that makes up the Communications Crew. Knowledge Mobilizers seek to gather and share knowledge.
Over the last few months, this team has been working on a series of videos to help community organizations with increasing youth volunteer engagement. In a conversation with local organizations, three areas of focus were indicated: how to recruit, retain, and recognize youth volunteers.
From there, we collected feedback from our network of youth volunteers. With pages of testimonials, personal experiences, and great advice, we were set to create a portfolio of helpful videos and documents that helped answer some of the most important questions surrounding volunteerism.
As mentioned before, the three areas that we focused on creating videos for were: how to retain, recruit, and recognize youth volunteers in our community. To achieve this goal, the Knowledge Mobilizers Team separated into 3 groups, with each group aiming to create a video on their designated subject.
The Recruit Group focused on working on the feedback that provides insight on how to better recruit youth volunteers and gain their interest in volunteering for an organization. The Retain Group focused on working on the feedback that will help to provide youth with a more comfortable space when volunteering; where youth can share their views on certain matters freely, and express themselves. The Recognize Group focused on the feedback that provides insight on how to appreciate youth volunteers for the work that they have done to achieve a common goal. Some ways of recognition discussed in the video included awards, certificates, or reference letters.
These short videos provide a summary of what youth volunteers are looking for when participating in community service. They are created for community organizations/committees that need feedback on how they can better catch the interest of the youth in our community. This team had a great time working on the videos and hope that we can expand our impact beyond the HYI.
You can see the Knowledge Mobilizers Team’s work by watching our videos!
