On Monday 7th March, the Change Creators met at Arup’s Bristol Office to continue with the development of their social change campaign. The group met with Peter Cooper, who is a Consultant and Research Engineer at Arup, and we took the group through Arup’s history and experience in engineering, consulting and project management.
The Change Creators separated into their groups of four and began to finalise their campaign ideas, taking into account time, resources, and whether their aims are achievable and realistic.
Andrea, Chelsea, Ella and Yelena are continuing to focus on services offered to young people dealing with mental health problems. Their aim is to diversify these services. They want to collect data, using brain sensors, that will show how young people feel after different types of therapy or counselling. The group also want to use phone sensors to monitor what the young people do after they have received these different types of therapy. Yelena says that this can help them see if and how art therapy has worked and can also help to identify when people are at risk.
The group working on food waste confirmed that they will be focusing on consumer/citizen food waste. They want to help people understand the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ – as they can be confused as meaning the same thing and people can throw away food that is perfectly fine to eat. Charlie, Emma, Jay and Mason want to show people that they can make meals like soups or smoothies from fruit and veg that is going out of date instead of wasting it and buying more. Another of their ideas is a tupperware that can sense when food is going off, giving people a chance to use the food in time and decreasing the amount being wasted.
The Change Creators then came together to share their new findings and ideas with the rest of the group, providing and receiving feedback and sharing how the two campaigns are developing. Peter also gave some valuable feedback to the groups, highlighting key issues associated with the two topics that are currently on the political agenda.
KWMC’s Young People’s Programme Manager Mena Fombo commented: ‘last night’s session was really positive, and the groups are now beginning to shape their social change campaigns. There is so much raw passion coming through the group members, I’m excited by the development of both of these projects’.
You can follow the Change Creators workshops live on Twitter at @Change_Creators
