Youth Ambassadors

History

An effective feature of White Ribbon’s strategy is to have Ambassadors, who are respected and influential role models, promoting White Ribbon messages to their network and community. Ambassadors play a vital role in building support, visibility and promoting White Ribbon’s messages to new groups. They can keep the White Ribbon messages alive beyond the November campaign.

Increasingly White Ribbon is targeting young men and women to promote respectful behaviour in their relationships.

Over recent years the Counties Manukau’s White Ribbon coordinating committee has had a range of campaign activities involving local young people. This encouraged the Salvation Army to create a local Youth Ambassador Leadership Scheme which has now developed into the White Ribbon Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme (YALP)

The programme is a now a day long session with high profile speakers and interactive segments for students. The content support information from Mates & Dates and the Loves Me Not Programmes.

One of our key aims with the Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme (YALP) is to give students the information about the issues we face as a society and encourage them to find their own way of communicating it to their peers. It is so important that young people get these messages not only from the adults in their lives but also that they take ownership of this issue and message if we want to see real change in the future. That has seen school dances, information evenings, assemblies, talks utilising some of our adult Ambassadors as well as our Spoken Word competition. Scots College created a fantastic short film that takes the central ideas of the campaign and creates a personal, relatable film using students and staff to address the issue of what it means to be a man.

The programme is running again this year, so if you know of a school that might be interested in taking part please pass this on and encourage them to get in touch with us. There is no cost to schools, beyond transporting students, and we want to make this programme available to as many schools as possible. There is more information about YALP here. There are currently plans to run the Youth Ambassador Leadership Programme in Wellington, Gisborne, Napier and Auckland in 2020 but we are keen to see it rolled out in other regions as well. Please write to us at contact@whiteribbon.org.nz if you would like more information.

Resources

This page gives you an idea of the content from the 2019 YALP.

Spoken Word Competition

One event that flows from the YALP is the Spoken Word Competition which allows students to present their ideas in a spoken word format. This is very powerful and White Ribbon has used this format to caputure the voice of students. The Spoken Word Competition in 2019 was held a at Wellington College with some high profile judges including the Justice – Parliamentary Under-Secretary Jan Logie.