Towards Improving Youth Mental Health - Annual Report 2018

TOWARDS IMPROVING YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH ANNUAL REPORT 2018
3 Charitable Programme for 2019
We will be working to develop our existing charitable programmes during 2019 as well as adding new
elements to make our programmes more relevant to our clients. This will mean an increase in social media
activity, a movement from paper to online publication and a more sustainable environmental model for
2019.
3.1 Schools Programme
It is our intention to continue to develop the Schools Programme in 2019. We are pushing forward with
new concepts for providing the Schools Programme to more schools around the country and for reducing
our consumption of paper and materials as many students will no longer take paper publications when
offered.
3.1.1 Delivering maximum impact
We have been looking at how we can deliver our Programmes to the maximum number of students and
the largest possible number of schools. Feedback from schools is that they would prefer to have less
impact on class schedules from outside programmes so, with this in mind, we are now developing an
entirely school based programme that does not require facilitation. This will allow schools to fit our
Schools Programme into their TY schedule for the year as well as adding it to 5 th and 6 th year classes as
required. Schools Visits by Facilitators will still be our preferred option of delivery.
Move to online
Feedback from schools and students is showing that rather than providing printed materials we
should move towards a fully online availability of all published materials. It is our intention to
move all materials to Yumpu by September 2019 as they provide a platform independent
viewing solution as well as full copyright protected PDF download facilities.
Move to video presentation
We have been providing resource packs to schools since 2014 which allow teachers to have our
School Programme materials available including lesson plans. We want to take this a step
further and have asked our Facilitators to put together a video presentation of the Schools
Programme Workshop that teachers can use in class or students can use for self-study.
3.1.2 Volunteer Facilitators
We will be continuing the process of finding and retaining appropriately qualified volunteer facilitators
during 2019.
Although we have plenty of applicants who attend facilitator events we are finding a very high drop out
rate due to the nature of the subject matter. We are also finding it difficult to find trainee facilitators
with the time, commitment and skillsets due to work or other commitments during school hours.
This process is on-going into 2019 and we hope to have a pool of 5 volunteer facilitators vetted and
trained for shadowing in September 2019.
3.1.3 Going Green
We are seeing an increasing reluctance from students to take printed materials from the programme
workshops due to their awareness of environmental impacts from paper usage. We are looking at
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YOUTH SUICIDE PREVENTION IRELAND