Ni Gallant: YAB Final Residential!

Firstly - and most importantly! - check out the brand new NDCS YAB blogspot page and look forward to many more amazing blogs about campaigns and events from all the YAB members!

This weekend 11 members of the YAB chugged and flew to Birmingham for the final -official- 2011 to 2012 YAB event.

The event was held at The Studio in central Birmingham - an amazingly colourful and inspiational building fillied with bean bags, a wii, a punch bag, inspirational quotes and as much hot chocolate as you could possibly drink!

As this was the final weekend the main focus was on evaluation but there was still plenty of opportunity to learn new skills and on Saturday we took part in a workshop run by the NDCS campaigns team on the change from DLA to PIP. It was definetely a workshop that made us sit up and think as we realised that nearly all of us would not qualify for PIP - maybe this is something the new board should be campaiging about! And we certainly gave Jess from campaigns plenty to think about!!!

The NDCS staff had set up a timeline of all the events and campaigns we had been to or run throughout the last year and it was amazing to think back on EVERYTHING we had managed to cram in! Certainly an awful lot of stuff!!

Throughout this year the YAB have had 4 residentials; been represented at the Scottish Festival of Politics, the Lib Dem Conference, the Cyber Space Conference, Internet Safety Week and many other events and also managed to fit in an amazing cinema subtitle campaign alongside other deaf awareness campaigns! - I'd say that was quite an achievement!

Also at the weekend were NDCS audiologist Vicki and Remark (a deaf run film and media company). With Vicki we made a series of videos explaining how equipment such as radio aids works, how you can retube your hearing aid and also a number of deaf awareness tips! All of which will feature on the NDCS Buzz website.
As well as this Remark also filmed all the activities that took place and an indiviual evaluation of our time on the board which will be used to encourage new young people to join the board.

"I have had such a fantastic experience on the board, meeting loads of new people, boosting my confidence and helping the NDCS to campaign for things that really affect young deaf people all over the UK. What a year it's been, too much has happened to put it into a few lines and words do very little justice to the hard work we all put in and the memories that we got out of it, which we will cherish forever!" - Andrew

On Saturday evening we also found time to go bowling at the Leisure Box to relax and catch up with another member Tom who has his maths exam today - Good luck!! Meaning he couldn't attend all weekend. It was an awesome time and there were a lot of funny moments - all of which were caught on camera!!

On Sunday afternoon we had a presentation and Thank You! session where we were all presented with bright blue YAB hoodies and listened to a rap written by the NDCS staff telling us all their favourite bits from the year!! - Very funny!
As a group we gave the staff a photobook Ellen had made and which we had all written our own personal messages in - were going to miss our brilliantly inspiring staff!!

Finally we all took part in a superb African Drumming workshop which threatened to bring down the whole building with noise and vibrations!!! Definetely a very memorable end to an amazing weekend! - But lets not forget the very tasty cake the staff had also bought us!