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NCS Overveiw

As a whole the NCS ‘experience’ was exceptional; I improved and learnt new skills, bettered my communication skills, polished my leadership and team work skills, increased my confidence, also learnt how to diffuse an argument quickly and efficiently. Everyday skills that I acquired were how to pitch a tent, making a camp fire and independently making my own dinner. Taking part in activities such as climbing mountains, caving, playing rounders’’, canoeing and camp fires, helped the participants form bonds by making new friends and do new things that they may have never done before. I was able to gain real life experience with pitching and presenting ideas with in turn helped me improve my confidence. 

I enjoyed my time taking part in the NCS programme and hope that others will take part and enjoy it as much as I did.

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Create a special fund for education in emergencies

##THE PETITION "We, the world's youth, teachers, parents and global citizens appeal to our governments to keep their promise, made at the United Nations in 2000, to ensure all out-of-school children gain their right to education before the end of 2015. We are standing up to bring an end to the barriers preventing girls and boys from going to school, including forced work and early marriage, conflict and attacks on schools, exploitation and discrimination. All children deserve the...

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Team Sabersan, Wave 5 

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Service: We volunteered to help a youth club/charity called Casper at Bexley youth centre who helped and provided acre for children with autism. They were the relief for parents who wanted a day’s breaks to rest and look after themselves instead of their children.  They also provide care for the children whilst their parents go to work. We also helped to set up a family barbeque event for the children and their families, so that they could interact in similar situations. Our job was to look after the children and supervise games organised by the Casper team and us volunteers. We were able to interact with the children and parents making some new friends along the way. We also joined in on the games with the children, entertaining them as their parents mingled or just sitting on the grass talking to them. The experience helped me to learn what other people in local communities were going through and the helped that they were receiving from small charities such as Casper. It helped me understand that doing something as small as playing with young children could go a long way and could be beneficial to others.

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Creative: During our 3rd week we were asked to come up with campaign ideas to promote a prominent issue in our society today. My group, team Sabersan, chose to promote diversity and to decrease discrimination. Our aim was to get people to mix and talk to those that they would have never have thought to talk to before. After much debate we named our campaign ‘Mix IT UP’. In order to understand if discrimination was a prominent issue in Beckenham, we had to go out and speak to the public and ask what their take on diversity was. Each paired up with a person in our team and came up with various questions such as: ‘how long have you lived in this borough?’, ‘what is your definition of diversity?’, ‘do you think that your community is diverse?’ and ‘if yes, what would you like you community to do to make it more diverse?’ and others. A team member and myself teamed up to perform this activity; I believe that at first I let my team mate take control and ask the questions but after a while I started to participate and contributed to calling people over and asking them the questions. With the answers collected we found that there was a large majority of the people in West Beckenham who thought that there was a lack of diversity in their communities and wanted to get to know people in their community. My team discussed ideas as to how to get people to mix and came up with the idea of a ‘ask a question banner’. The purpose of this banner would be to separate two people, each person standing on one side, so that they wouldn’t be able to see other and ask each other questions that were written on the banner in order to get to know a little bit about them. The questions, such as ‘galaxy or dairy milk?’, ‘Samsung or iPhone?’, ‘what is your favourite colour?’, ‘do you have any pets?’ etc., would act as a conversation starter. After 2 minutes the two people would be asked to step out from behind the banner and meet each other face to face. Then a wrist band, balloon or sticker would be given to the participants as a ‘thank you’ and ‘well done’. If permission was given, a picture would also be taken and posted onto the ‘Mix IT UP’ blogs on Instagram, twitter and Facebook which were run by two of our team members. This was used to promote the campaign. To get funding for this campaign we had to pitch the idea to a board of ‘dragons’. Our pitch had to be imaginative and put across our point clearly. To demonstrate we asked two of the ‘dragons’ to test out the ‘banner of questions’ for two minutes and took a picture to upload onto one of our blogs. We were able to gain £60; the money was used to by the balloons, t-shirts (for the team, so that people had an idea that we were campaigning), wrist-bands and paper (for the banner). We went out and did the campaign in Bromley High Street on a Saturday afternoon where it was very busy and some people walked past us, but we kept going, inviting people over with the stickers, wristbands and balloons.

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Action: I hiked up Mount Sugarloaf, with my team, for approximately 4 hours and then another two hours back down it. I was able to get to know the team better and encourage those who thought they wouldn’t be able to make it up the ‘hill’. We sang songs and made jokes to take our minds off the distance that we had to walk. When we made it to the top of the hill we all sat, rested and talked, mostly complaining about the hike back down the hill, getting to know each other a little bit more. The scenery was beautiful and we took time to take pictures of each other to keep as memories and to post on social media. When we finally got back down the hill, we had to pitch up tents as we were to stay on the site overnight. Everyone pitched in to help as we were all tired and wanted to get inside the tent and rest. After a while we joined in the games that were going on around the site, the main game being rounder’s. During the game we bonded more as we were all put on one team and had to work together, we were the wining team. I had a lot of fun and it was a new experience to have even though it was very exhausting.

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Our NCS programme is an intense three part programme for 15 to 17 to take on new challenges, learn new skills and meet new people.

My experience with NCS was at first challenging due to the fact that I didn’t know anyone there. Although it is set up so that each person is put with people in their school boroughs, I was in a different category and therefore didn’t know anyone. However, I interacted with the people in my team (mainly the girls) and got to know them. The action (personal) part of the program was the section that I found the most difficult, pushing yourself to go out of your comfort zone and do things that you may have never done before. Sometimes the support of the team felt a little bit patronizing because none of us knew each other that well. However, we all had to push ourselves to get through ‘the challenge’ and I believe that I had fun doing it. During the program there were arguments between and within teams that caused problems when working together on a project, but we had to be mature and diffuse the arguments. It was hard at first but after a while it became easy to communicate with our team and others to diffuse situations and get on with the work. Every week we would have two different people who would work together to lead the team in their tasks. This helped me to improve my leadership skills and to make quick decisions. I found that leading a team was a lot of pressure and came with a lot of responsibility with making sure all the equipment was present and that everybody was accounted for whenever we went out on a field trip. The NCS programme helped me improve my confidence to talk to new people. It also improved my communication, leadership and time management skills. I was also able to improve my ability to work in a team and participate in the tasks/activities that were set. Overall NCS the Challenge is something that I would recommend for others to take part in due to the fact that you are able to learn skills such as looking after yourself in a university setting (Greenwich University), that school cannot teach.