North Lanarkshire Peer Educators - No Knives Better Lives Blog

Coatbridge Peer Education Group have successfully written a blog. As you can see it has been insightful, witty and interesting! It gives you an idea of what our group is about.

To us, peer education isn’t just about teaching young people about issues that affect the world such as alcohol, drugs and knife crime etc. It is a passion so that we can do what we love to teach our peers so they are ready to venture into the world and make the right decisions.

The Coatbridge Peer Education group was formed in May 2012, when Robert, a youth worker was asked by North Lanarkshire Council if anyone wanted to become peer educators and initially 9 young people from Coatbridge signed up. The group now have 13 peer educators.

As peer educators we have been fortunate enough to have been invited to a series of events to help with our peer ed. training. These such events include NKBL (No Knives, Better Lives) Youth Summit at Glasgow Science Center, special showing the Angels Share with Paul Brannigan and a workshop afterwards relating to our NKBL work as peer educators. We also attended Banter with the Bosses, Scottish Parliament peer ed. event at Coatbridge College and our last recent event was the Young Scot Awards in Glasgow in the Clyde Auditorium. I can safely say that we all have enjoyed every event we have attended and every event has been very beneficial to us and our training as well as to continue our training and use it in our future. We look forward to our next event as we are intrigued to find out what is in store.

We have participated in a number of trainings including No Knives Better Lives Peer Education training with Sonal from Fast Forward; North Lanarkshire Council peer education training and weekly meetings to progress our skills with No Knives, Better Lives.

Through out the year of being at the Coatbridge peer education group we have all earned awards. Two members have earned three stars in their Dynamic Youth Awards and five members have earned a bronze awards in their Youth Achievement and most of us are now waiting for the Saltire Award. Soon most of the members will be participating and earning awards in Duke of Edinburgh.

As peer educators we will be delivering sessions to local and junior youth groups before the summer holidays begins. During the summer, we will continue to meet as a peer education group and further develop our skills with a view to delivering more sessions to youth groups and schools.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

Written by Nadia Curtis, Andrew Gallagher, Jamie Frew, Lyndsay Docherty,

Kevin Gillick and Morgan Russell

The group getting their views across at an event

On the red carpet at the Young Scot Awards 2013

The group brainstorm the consequences of knife crime

Who said peer education can't be fun!

North Lanarkshire Peer Educators

No Knives, Better Lives Blog

Is Coatbridge ready for its very own Schumacher?

We went on a residential to the Borders. We started off by getting an introduction into what peer education was from Sonal from Fast Forward/No Knives, Better Lives. She was in charge of us for the weekend and what we learnt and how we learnt it. We done various activities in the form of a session. However, at the time we did not know what a session was. So we were learning facts on knife crime such as there is no safe place to stab someone and if you get caught with a knife you will get 4 years in jail.

We are more than qualified to be peer educators as we haven’t only done one training and team building residential at Castle Howard but two in order to better our skills. We can now deliver sessions to younger people about knife crime and drugs so that they become the best they can be.

What are you waiting for? Read the rest of the blog and find out about the Coatbridge Peer Education Group.