seeking a like minded business partner!

If you like the sound of my business idea below and can support it, or wish to get involved, in any way, then i would LOVE to hear from you. Thanks :)x

Here goes:

Agender: Adressing Gender and Sexuality, Supporting Achievement

Short Description

Agender: Addressing Gender, Supporting Achievement

Agender is a limited U.K company delivering workshops and specialist training in the area of gender and sexuality to schools and community centres. Plans are to extend beyond the Yorkshire and Humber area and evolve to cater for the needs of business in house training.

Summary

My Business Idea: to provide consultancy (and training) to schools, youth organisations and businesses in the area of Gender and Sexuality. To present/to facilitate groups for ideas/to deliver groups.

My Suitability: My extensive experience supporting young people in schools and youth groups, particularly gender and sexuality work (i.e. girls groups, peer education work and L.G.B.T.Q youth support work), my Degree in Humanities and Social Studies, My Diploma in coaching and mentoring and my Masters degree in Gender and Sexuality.

(UPN) Unique Selling Point: This work will greatly help schools to pass ofsted and meet the healthy schools, investors in pupils and such targets. It was also aid inclusion targets.


Examples of Sessions Offered:

L.G.B.T. focused

Supporting Lesbian and Gay Young people in school.
Inclusive History-putting L.G.B.T lives in the curriculum.
The law and L.G.B.T young people.
Meeting the sexual health needs of L.G.B.T.Q young people.
Meeting the mental health needs of L.G.B.T.Q young people
L.G.B.T.Q young people and homelessness
L.G.B.T.Q young people and substance misuse.


Young Women Focused

Supporting Young women who have experienced abuse.
Young Women, Anger and Assertiveness.
Young women?s positive body image.
Positive relationships,

Young Men Focused

Supporting Young women who have experienced abuse.
Young men, Anger and Assertiveness
Following Expectations: working with young men and masculinity
Young women?s positive body image.
Positive relationships,


Non-Gender Specific

Positive relationships:
Exceeding Expectations: Study skills for success
Supporting BME young people
Personal safety for young people
Puberty and how to survive it,
Life Skills, making the winning C.V-start now.

Peer Education training

Sex and relationships

Some sessions will be particular to schools, others to youth centres and drop-in's. Others may be particular to conferences and organisations.

Please add yourself as a follower using the 'follow' button on the right. Thanx!

Done hair and nails, now what?

check this out:)xx

Done hair and nails, now what?

Why modern day youth workers should
consider binning the beauty box


Thoughts ideas and catchy slogans by the
Feministwebs.com gang

From a base in Manchester, and with a focus across the North
West, a collective of academics, youth work practitioners and young people have
come together to 'do something' about young women and girls' youth work.


'When OFSTED came into the youth club, the boys we playing on
the pool table and the girls were hiding out in the toilets'


'In the session there were young women who had never worn
make-up in their lives, and they had all been given by their youth worker a
'Girl's world' head to practise putting make-up on... and I thought... have we
stepped back to the 1950s?!'


The increasing emphasis on crime and disorder within youth
work has meant that agendas, focus, and inevitably funding is being directed
toward work with is diversionary, targeted at young men, and starts from an
ideology of 'prevention'.


Good youth workers on the other hand, start from a position
of possibility, creation not consumption and participation. But the support for 'progressive' work is
patchy.


In youth work settings, the inevitable dichotomy emerges
therefore, of boys at the pool table or playing football, and girls doing
make-up or creating raunchy dance routines.


An end to sexism.... are we nearly there yet?


So this is what we have done: we have created an online
archive and resource for young women and girls' work from a feminist
perspective at www.feministwebs.com
which includes ideas, session plans, tools and levers for change. We are now in our phase two (or 'second wave'
if you will!) in which young women from across the North West are being trained
in oral histories and are going to go out across the north west collecting
archive materials and stories from older feminist youth workers that were
active in the 1970s-1990s. So spread the word, get involved, and urge young
women you know to go out there and learn how to fly a plane instead of always
doing their hair and nails... it's time to bin the beauty box!


Interested? Contact Amelia@ica-uk.org.uk

Urgent call out to Queer youth and workers

Please see below for this amazing event and email antpaperclip@hotmail.com if you can help :)

******************************************************

call out to queer zine and poster makers: please send your work to queer youth camp for our radical queer culture library!

Camp fYrefly is a youth camp for queer and trans kids aged 14 – 24 in the middle of Canada’s most politically conservative province, Alberta. I am the artist-in-residence at camp this year and the program involves all things radical: history of queer activism and art, workshops on how to make posters, zines and projects for political action, and building supportive communities outside of the rainbow mainstream.

I am collecting fuel for the fire! Please send your work to me to help build our resource library of queer culture.

**need it by July 20!**

email me if you need help with postage.

****************************************************************

Great stuff huh, maybe we could get something going like that over here? :)

Ugly Shy Girl: A Book Review

Ugly Shy Girl by Laura Dockrill is a real treat of a book. Its a story of a outsider, the kind of kid who tries to hide behind her fringe but screams her presence through her inability to read, let alone follow, the unspoken rules of school. A girl who can no more 'fit' then the baggy, torn, coat on her back. If you pick it up the bookshop you could easily think that it had been dumped on the closest shelf by a teen, with it's youthful format and gorgeous child-like scrawls and accompanying drawings, its screams 8-15. But make no mistake this is definitely a book for older folk. In fact, with it's vivid desciptions of bullying and it's..ahem..vibrant language, it really could be too much for the young reader. As Dockrill notes ''You might have once known somebody like ugly shy girl..... you might have even been like her yourself''. What reader cannot find them selves on either side of that fence. And if you too were Ugly Shy Girl, you will brave your discomfort and pain as you experience (re-live?) Ugly Shy Girls oppression at the hands of those that excel at the rules. But you will persevere and share the relief and joy with Abigail (a.k.a Ugly Shy Girl) as she finds her own strenght (despite the cruelty of the 'popular girls') her own resilience and ultimately her own confidence in her individuality. I love the playfulness of this book, the emotional honesty and the creativity, I love the fact that it shows the power of a strong female relationship. It is a rarity is girls fiction, it is female autonomy and female solidarity which rescue Abigail, never a boy. What an absolute delight.

Skool Rulz

Are you out there?

I want to get this space talking! If you work with young people or have an interest in this, get in touch, A bit about me: I have two jobs at the moment, one working with L.G.B.T.Q young people and the other supporting kids in a mainstream school. Working in a school (as I have done lots in the past) I know the script. Schools prepare young people to be future citizens, thats their role, they gear towards the mainstream. There is a tremendous push for conformity.

Good: respect for authority/obedience to those with more power than you, don't focus on what you enjoy, focus on what will make you 'successful', i.e: owning a large house, marriage, kids, a car, several holidays a year and always wanting bigger, better, more. Does this make you happy? or always hungry, paranoid and insecure? I don't know, i've always follwed my own path and although it doesn't feature any of the above, it makes me happy. Bad: To challenge authority, to follow your own path, to be your own judge/boss, to go for what makes you happy even though you may veer from the 'right path'. What is the risk of this for the future of the workforce? For the future of the economy, for the future of the family?

Goths, moshers, Girls who like girls, Boys who like boys, gender blenders, tomboys, sissy's, rebelious kids, What if they don't grow out of it? One by one, these kids learn the message that these factors dont equate to success in society, one must grow up and grow into the future workforce. Young people are shaped and spun by the education sytem, disipline and praise the tools of the master, until they leave schools as 'young women' and 'young men', all ready for the next stop on the conveyor belt.......

But what of the great people in history, did they obey authority even when they knew that authority was wrong? What if Rosa Parks had kept quite when she was denied a seat on the bus that day due to the colour of her skin, what if Harvey Milk had accepted the view that he did not deserve to live due to his homosexuality, what if the suffragetes had accepted that they were inferior due to their sex, ...... What if these people (and so many others) had followed the rules and not acted? Where would we be now?

What do schools really teach us?

''Don't follow anyone who is not going anywhere'' (anywhere that you want to be)

Ms Fitz is everywhere!

http://www.myspace.com/themsfitzproject