Here’s what one of your young people said about the conference…

On the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of October young people from a wide range of uniformed youth organisations gathered in the prestigious Harrow school for the Youth Organisations in Uniform’s (YOU) first leadership conference. This widely anticipated event involved cadets from CCF, army, police, sea, air, fire, St. John’s ambulance and of course the Boys Brigade.

Throughout the weekend we were given opportunities to learn from some of today’s key leaders. Vice Admiral Kyd taught us that a good leader does what is right, not what gets them liked and that we must constantly strive for the betterment of our team. Police Commissioner Cressida Dick spoke about the importance of being a leader in the good times as well as in the adverse; everyone having their own ‘Sergeant’ who they can look up to and be vulnerable with. Finally, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards: Kathryn Stone, emphasised the necessity for a strong moral core such as the Nolan principles that encompass honesty and ownership of mistakes.

Interspersed with these interactive speeches were exciting challenges and tasks that allowed us to exercise all that we had learnt. Realistic scenarios with the police and fire service, assault courses with the army and team challenges with the navy all required us to step up into leadership roles, work as a team and strive towards a common goal.

My personal highlight, alongside the delicious food, was seeing how the different organisations all came together in one uniform during the firefighting activity. Despite only meeting each other half an hour earlier we were able to forget our institutional differences and assemble a network of hose pipes and put out the ‘fire’. This created a great sense of satisfaction and the team morale was very high even though it was raining heavily the whole day.

Thank you so much to all the leaders that made this weekend possible and in particular to Debbie Wilkinson whose impeccable organisation made the YOU conference an immense success. Hopefully this can become a regular event that will continue to inspire future generations of young people.

For more information about YOU London, please click here.