I am a member of the Young St Vincent de Paul group in Kilmuckridge, Colaiste an Átha. This is the first year that this organisation has been put into place in our school. This group aims to help the people of our community. The Young SVP development group provides a great opportunity for personal and social development whilst also gaining an understanding of the ethos, missions and aims of SVP. The programme helps you to develop projects that will improve the lives of others and gain a better understanding of Social Justice. Our group currently exists of ten people from Transition Year and we have group meetings on a weekly basis where we talk about our plans and what we aim to do as a group. For example, on the 14th of August we held our Launch day which was to show people that we were here in the school. For the launch day we took the first years for the first three classes where we had a games day in the gym. We offered them two choices on whether they would like to play basketball or just play different types of games such as jenga and checkers. When they chose which activity they would rather do we split them into teams and whenever each team won a game they would win a point
and the person with the most points won a prize of sweets at the end. We also collected money from to go towards the Young SVP group and also donated some to the Saint Vincent de Paul group. We have come up with a plan up until April in which we would like to complete. Some of which include writing positive notes to place in lockers at the end of the week to remind people how much of a good job they are doing, setting up a litter committee with one year going out each month in memory of a local who passed away this Summer. We hope to hold a coffee morning talk with third years so they can ask us questions about the Junior Cert on anything they might be worried about so we can hopefully help ease their minds, a relaxing 15 minute tea and biscuit break for fifth and sixth years so they can relieve the stress of exam years for a few minutes, and more. We wish to benefit our local community and school community as much as possible and hope we can make an impact and a difference. We hope you will be able to support us as we will make sure that we support things going on in this school and try and make a difference no matter how small.