‘Inspiration in action’ is the UN volunteer tagline. The purpose is to encourage youth volunteers to learn skills that will be useful for employability in the future. Volunteering is a loose term- by collaborating with community groups in Kenya, volunteering is more about engaging in partnerships, developing relationships between each other in order to adhere to a civil society and social inclusions. Community based learning like the workshops we took part in today is a process of ‘service learning’, it’s about learning, reflecting and knowledge development.

My skill set doesn’t really include video production but along with the group I worked alongside with today I have gained a new skill. The workshops weren’t an easy process, although we had a well- thought out agenda it went out of the window when firstly the majority of the group wanted to do video (audio was omitted) and there were more of Brighton uni volunteers than Kenyan participants. The engagement process was difficult, we had to do a lot of prompting to get ideas flowing, things starting looking up when we gave visual demonstrations of the equipment. All participants were excited by drafting up the storyboard for the documentary on entrepreneurship, I think they couldn’t wait to get started in filming! We had mock interviews to practice for the real thing tomorrow. Shooting b-role was a lot of fun, we got to engage with each other a lot more and find out more about people’s skills and interests.

Today’s workshop was slow to get off the ground but then we progressed quickly. Engagement is a challenge, a lot harder than I ever imagined. All though we will face this again in Rongo I think we will find better ways to get over the icy- ness. The workshop was successful other than the hiccups!