Partnership & Participation is Everything

Young People’s Interview Panel Receives Certificates

WTMY builds young people’s interview panel. By Sarah. 

WTMY is growing! Thanks the generosity and kindness of a family in Sydney, we will shortly be taking on an Outreach Key Worker for one year. Until now, unbelievably all our achievements have been down to a team of dedicated Nepalese and International volunteers (including WTMY Directors) and one very passionate and hard working Programme’s Manager Purnima (above). WTMY thinks long and hard about ways in which we can build genuine partnerships and involvement with the community we support and we thought, ‘what better time to do it than asking them to help select our new member of staff!’ We decided to build a interview panel of older and younger members of the community (male and female) to represent the communities views and wishes. First, the panel of four participated in a workshop to think about what being an interviewer does and what kinds of skills and qualities a new support worker needs to have in order to provide quality support to the community. One panel member commented

“I felt good as I liked being part of the administrative side of WTMY and also to meet new people. I was a bit nervous at  first but Purnima mam made me feel more comfortable”.

They also thought about how they would like to interview the candidates and came up with creative ways in which to interview them. WTMY was so impressed with their innovation and ideas!

The panel interviewed the three final candidates finding out more about each candidate and asking them a mix of questions such as ‘how they feel about working with street communities’ . The panel were looking for how the candidates spoke with them because being treated with respect was very important to everyone. The panel then asked (and we think this is the most ingenious bit) each candidate to provide an activity as part of the interview. One candidate was asked to teach the children and young people a song and dance with English words, another was asked to teach maths for the bag making ladies, and the young people asked the final candidate to do drama with them based on ‘the importance of education’. The young people might just be the toughest interview panel anyone might have to face! Both the candidates and the children and young people did such a fantastic job.

The young people’s panel might just be the toughest interview panel that anyone has had to face in an interview!

After the interviews the panel sat down and reflected on their interviews weighing up each ones strengths, which was then fed back to the WTMY team, it was a really close call between each candidate! We are happy to say that we did recruit someone and we are looking forward to welcoming them in the next few weeks. and `WTMY will announce them in the next newsletter. Needless to say we were super proud of the children and young people who took part in the panel and they were given certificates on the day to say thank you.  One of the young people said

“I was excited because I got a chance to meet with new people and felt like an employee for a day with WTMY. On the day I also got to join in a maths class, dance and drama which was great fun!”.

We think that this is how you build genuine partnerships and trust  and we feel very privileged and honoured to be part of such an incredible community.