What we Learnt at YSI

By Lewis

During our week in the YSI programme, we did many workshops and learnt many things about the YSI as an organisation and the concept of Social Innovation.

When we arrived in the office on Monday, we were given a tour of the office and campus by Courtney and Arunima. There was only one workshop on Monday: the Activate report with Mollie. We learnt about YSI's Activate programme and how teams would submit their reports at the end of the year. We were then used as test subjects and were asked to give feedback on how the questions detailing the report were structured to hopefully make it easier to understand for future Activate teams.

We had two workshops on Tuesday. We discussed how technology could be used to help people and then in the context of social innovation. We then moved on to the use of AI and the ethics of using it for social innovation with Juul. Later on, we were educated on Social Enterprises in depth and were tasked with thinking up our own social enterprises to solve a social issue we chose.

Wednesday was our remote day, where we worked from home. We were introduced and familiarised with the YSI Echoboard via a webinar and participated in two other workshops later on in the day. Regarding the Echoboard, we learnt about how the data was collected by surveys conducted by the YSI of young people and presented in the form of the Echoboard, and how they were planning to improve it.

The workshops detailed the Ignite programme (In the North of Ireland and Border countries of the ROI, and the Communications & Marketing happening in the YSI currently, consequently, we learned a lot about the YSI’s social media presence.

On Thursday, we once again had two workshops, a 3d printing workshop with Naomi, and a financing one with Oonagh and Maria. We learnt about how technology could be used in social innovation and gained a better understanding of how 3d printers work.

We then gained insight on how the finances and grants worked for Not-For-Profit/Non Profit Organizations, and did an exercise that taught us how budgeting worked.

Finally, Friday had arrived. We had an ideation session on the Activate programme and became more familiar with it, and came up with things that could be implemented for fun. We then were given a presentation about the Youth Panel by Juul and Angela, learning about its structure and what their future projects were.