Youth Blogs
Oliver Warne - Learning South West Board of Trustees
I suppose I should start with introducing myself. My name is Oliver Warne and I am on the board of trustees for Learning south west representing young people and reporting on the work of the UK Youth Parliament in the South West. I was previously a member of the UK Youth Parliament for two years in which I enjoyed campaigning for young people. Over the two years I accumulated over 1800 votes in UK Youth Parliament elections which is why I was invited to represent young people on the Learning south west board.
Today (13 April 2011) I went to the South West Youth Parliament regional meeting held in Taunton, at Wellsprings leisure center. The objective of the regional meeting is to bring all the Members and Deputies together to work on their regional priorities, which were decided by vote. Not only do they work on their campaigns but they discuss important issues, feedback on some of their local work and help with the work of some external organizations. Today for example the Members and Deputies helped Norah O'Brien, Sexual Health Manager (Young People) at the Office for Sexual Health South West in her campaign and gave feedback on the logo designs for a young person friendly pharmacy logo.
Moya Dunne from Dorset and Georgina Evans from South Gloucestershire, who seconded the motion (in absence of Jaysen Sharpe from Somerset and Joshua Hobson from Somerset who also seconded the motion) presented a PowerPoint on voting unity in the South West. The aim is to have more synchronization in the elections in the South West, so that all the voting systems, election dates and results events run at the same time. This would help with publicity as regional media could report on the UKYP South West elections as a whole. Also with a standardization of the voting system, it doesn’t change in fairness from one constituency to another. However the elections budget varies massively in each local area depending on how much money the local council is willing to give to the cause. This makes it difficult to create a standard template for the voting system. It was an idea at the center of the discussion in the regional meeting and is likely to continue being debated in the next regional meeting.