Laura from Coin Street shares her experience working with Empovthise UCL, a student-led project that focuses on improving technological literacy and achieving digital equity. Read on to learn about the project’s impact on the community, and Laura’s advice for those who are looking to work with our student-led projects!
Can you tell us a bit about Coin Street?
Coin Street is a social enterprise based in South Bank. It has just had its 40th anniversary and we are doing some celebrations at the moment. It is quite an interesting and unique organisation. It manages some social housing, public spaces, a range of shops, restaurants, and commercial units. We also have a nursery and a family support team that supports families with children under 5.
The community programs team focuses on improving health and well-being in the local community, and we do so through a range of activities. For instance, we have tutoring, youth leadership projects, youth clubs, and sport sessions for young people, and coffee mornings, singing groups, and feel good sessions for old people where they get to use the gym and sports facilities.
We are a really busy team running sessions seven days a week, and so we use volunteers in a range of different ways, mostly helping us deliver the sessions. For example, we have volunteers that help with coffee mornings to help do the drinks, chat to people, run our quiz, and we have a lot of student volunteers that help us with our tutoring programme, basically a whole range of opportunities for people to get involved in their local community!
Can you briefly describe the activities that Coin Street was involved in with Empovthise UCL? Can you explain a bit about how this collaboration works?
I went to a UCL Volunteering Fair earlier in October and had a chat with one of the students, Evelyn. She just came and had a chat with me about the programs we have at Coin Street and was interested in working with one of the groups. She had some experience with a charity in Hong Kong that focused on delivering digital skills for young people, and was keen to do something similar here in London.
We then had a Teams meeting to chat about what could work. We have a young leaders group for 12 to 18 years old, who meets on Monday evenings to develop their own projects. The idea is to encourage them to be leaders, to manage budgets, and to have the skills to deliver things they want to do. The group has just finished a food justice project and we were looking at what other opportunities we could have for the group, and the project felt like it could be a good fit.
So Evelyn and a couple other students came and met the group. They had a chat with some of the students, got a little bit of a feel of what could work, spoke to some staff members as well, and they were keen to work with us, and it went from there. We did the normal volunteer checks we do at Coin Street, and the students did some paperwork as part of the student-led project to say what they were going to be doing and put the proposal forward.
The collaboration started in January when the students came and ran sessions for the group between January and March, which covered a range of topics and skills. We had sessions about AI and ChatGPT, different ways to do research, and social media. After these sessions, each group decided on a particular topic they wanted to work on.
We had one group with younger students who wanted to make a website about selling slime, another group that did a podcast about the impact of social media on young people’s mental health, and another group who were interested in doing a website about history, particularly around colonialism and how that still impacts people today. We also had a student who was really keen on art and wanted to do videos of them drawing, and we had one of our A-Levels student who wanted to make her own music video for an original song. She wrote a song and recorded it, and did a music video for it. I think she already had some editing skills, but she really enjoyed working with the UCL students to learn new skills and improve what she could already do. The students also provided some brilliant equipment that was part of the package with UCL’s support. We had some new speakers which were helpful for recording the podcast and the music video, and the students also used their own materials like their laptops to help show young people what to do and the sorts of programs they could use.
In May, the students hosted us at UCL and the young people all gave presentations on the projects they’ve done. We had a workshop on presentation skills first, and the students had a bit of time to finish off their presentations, and they each presented their projects to the rest of the group. Some parents also came and watched as well, and everyone did a brilliant job. They gave great presentations and got certificates and rewards for the best projects. I think the students learnt a lot and enjoyed the independence of working on their own project.
They learnt a lot about teamwork, having different people taking responsibilities for different areas, and I think they are really inspired in the end.
I think it worked out so well. It is not something we would have done at all without the support from the UCL students. It was a really, really brilliant resource for us. The students planned the sessions and delivered them very well. They communicated really well with me and other team members about when they were going to come, the materials they need etc. They were such a pleasure to work with! Also because the students are quite young compared to some of the staff, young people really loved working with them, and the students really enjoyed sharing their skills and experiences as well. I think the students also enjoyed working with young people and being in a different environment than university, and being a part of our community. I think everybody really enjoyed it.
What impact did Empovthise UCL have on the participants and Coin Street?
For the participants, they learnt specific digital skills which they didn’t have, or didn’t have in that depth. They also benefited from teamwork, and working with new people they don’t normally work with. I think they also benefited from the presentation, having to stand up in front of others and present to the best they could.
They were really proud of the work they’ve done, and I think some were a bit surprised that they actually managed to do something that was quite ambitious.
The volunteers also did the sessions in a way which was really inclusive. For example, one of our young people, who doesn’t have a huge amount of ability to do a complex project, was able to do something that was straightforward but still get involved and feel part of the project, and for those who already have a lot of skills, they really enhanced their work and take it up a level. So I think that kind of inclusiveness really benefited everybody and provided them a sense of achievement.
For the organisation, the project enhanced what we were delivering. It gave a focus to that group, and we had those three months where it was really clear what everybody was working on. The students engaged the group and made it fun, and that really enhanced those sessions for us. I think the staff probably learnt something from the sessions as well!
I’d say in the past, I’ve been a bit more reluctant about being approached by somebody who wants to run a project with, and I think this partnership made me feel braver about taking on other projects and seeing how we would fit them into what we are already doing.
What advice would you give to another organisation considering whether to host one of our Student-Led Projects?
Be open to the students’ ideas, be willing to be flexible, and to trust them. The students who volunteered to take ownership of the project will really commit to it. I suppose organisations can be nervous about whether students will deliver what they promised, and indeed the students did an amazing job. They adapted the sessions as they went along to make sure they were relevant to the young people. They also recognised that it was a youth space, and so they managed to keep people’s attention and engagement very well, without making it feel too school-like or too strict. I was really impressed with them all and would recommend other organisations to take up the opportunity as well.
It is all about finding the right fit for the project and the organisation, so they can work well for both sides. For us, Evelyn was really proactive and had a clear vision of what she wanted to do, but was flexible enough to fit with the groups we already work with. Instead of putting it on as a new activity, we incorporated the project into a session we already run, so it wasn’t really any extra work for others in the organisation. In fact, it just enhanced what we were already offering to the group. Also, because the project not only focuses on delivering skills, but also highlights the element of independence for the young people, the project gave them a chance to work on something and present it back, to have real ownership of it. The projects could be tailored to young people’s interests, which makes it a perfect fit for our group.
We don’t want to just deliver skills, we want them to be able to use them in a way that makes sense for their personal development as well. And yeah, it just worked very well and was a really good fit!
I think it was also the communication. The team was on top of replying to any emails I sent, keeping me informed about how things were going, and happy to do any of the paperwork I needed them to do. Because they were working with young people, they needed DBS checks and references, and they were happy to fit in with the procedures that we had. While you can just have people come and do sessions with young people with supervision, the fact that the students had those checks just meant that you could feel a lot more confident with them being in the group and sometimes working individually with small groups. Although we still supervise the whole space, we felt confident in them working in the group.