Local Supporter Guidance Pack

It is important that the whole local church/circuit gets involved to support the Local Agent(s) of Change. This is not solely the responsibility of the Local Supporter, but you will need to have conversations with the minister, leadership team, and Church Council to encourage their involvement.

To support you in this, once you have registered as a Local Supporter, the church leadership will be automatically contacted and asked to confirm their support of you and the programme. They will be asked to commit to:

• Pray
• Listen
• Respond

Praying for the Local Agents of Change

There are many ways in which churches could commit to praying for this programme. For example praying in the main worship each week, holding a prayer gathering specifically for this programme, having a small team (or one committed person) who prays for each of the local Agents throughout the year. Encouraging this as a regular commitment will underpin this programme with prayer and will help to create a greater awareness of, and investment in, the programme from the church members.

Listening to the Local Agents of Change

The children and young people who are Local Agents will have listened to their peers to hear their views on a variety of issues. It is important that these findings are shared with the local church or circuit. There are a variety of ways in which this could happen and it will depend on your context and on your Local Agent(s). For example, the young people could feedback during a worship service for the congregation to hear, or they could report to the Church Council and present their findings, or they could write up what they have discovered and distribute in a newsletter. However it is done, creating a plan for how this will happen and supporting the Local Agent(s) to feedback will be an important aspect of the Local Supporter role.

Responding to the Agents of Change

Giving the young people a platform to feedback is important but becomes tokenistic if there is no response from the local church/circuit about what they are hearing. The response will very much depend on what the young people feedback. The response could be a whole church response, with a decision taken to do something specific like fundraising, holding an awareness day, setting up an eco team, making changes to the building displays etc. However, the response could also be of a more individual nature, such as people being asked to sign a petition or change what products they buy in the supermarket. The role of the Local Supporter would be to help the young people think about what response they would like to see, and then help them to raise this with the appropriate people/teams at church, such as the leadership team or Church Council.

This programme will flourish where it is an integrated part of local church life and not seen as something separate that the children and young people are doing, which the church aren’t aware of. The hope is that this programme will help to create dialogue between the generations and ultimately have an impact on the whole church as well as the individual young people who are signed up as Local Agents of Change.

To help prepare you for most of the following tasks, you will have been invited to book into a short, online briefing in January with members of the Connexional Team when you registered as a Local Supporter. These briefings will provide you with all the information you need and give opportunity to ask questions about anything you’re unsure of. There will also be opportunity to attend a debrief meeting at the end of the year.

Gaining support from your local church/circuit

• Before you start anything, make sure you have the support from the church/circuit members and leadership.

The ‘Use Your Voice' Pack

• This pack will be published twice a year (in January and September). It is designed to be used by the Local Agents of Change, with your help as adult Local Supporter, to consult with other children and young people.
• Please support and encourage the Local Agent(s) of Change to run these consultations in the way most suitable for their context. This could be as part of a regular Sunday School or Youth Group session, with the help of their school or as part of a specially organised event. (Please note, if a Local Agent of Change wants to organise a more formal gathering of children/young people, they need to do this with your support, or with a teacher, youth leader or minister who has been safely recruited to the satisfaction/policy of the school/church).
• Once the consultation has taken place, your role is then to help the Local Agent of Change to feed back to the local church in a variety of ways (see previous section).

Supporting Local Agents to attend online gatherings and feedback to Youth President and Youth Reps

• Following both the Use Your Voice consultations, there will be an online meeting, hosted by the Youth President and Youth Reps. Find the dates for these on the website.
• All Local Agents of Change will be invited to attend these meetings, to tell our Youth Reps and Youth President what they have been doing and hearing locally.
• Your role, as Local Supporter, will be to make sure the Local Agent(s) of Change have registered properly to participate in the Zoom gatherings, including getting the relevant permissions from the parent/carer. If the child is accessing the event from their home, the parent/carer will need to accept responsibility for safely supervising their child’s participation in the gatherings. A template permission form is available.
• In addition to the gatherings, there will also be a short electronic form to fill out (either by the Local Agent or the Supporter) with feedback from the consultations. If a Local Agent of Change is unable to attend the gathering, this means that we still get to hear what their peers have told them.

Meeting other Local Agents of Change in the area

• Often children and young people can feel isolated if they are the only person their age in a church. This programme could provide a great opportunity for participants to meet up and work with other children and young people who are on the programme and who live close by. If you sign up as a Local Supporter on behalf of a circuit, this could be a great opportunity to bring children and young people from different churches together. Your District Ambassador will be able to help make those links locally.

Growing the discipleship of the Local Agent(s) of Change

• A significant part of this programme is about encouraging the growth in discipleship of the Local Agent of Change. This can happen through you finding opportunities to weave prayer and God conversations into your support for the Local Agent(s) of Change, and helping them to see this as a part of their discipleship journey. Growth in discipleship is also helped when children and young people have a role and a purpose as part of the wider church family, which this programme aims to provide.

3Generate

• At 3Generate there will be a short gathering for all those involved in the Local Agent of Change programme. This is not an essential part of the programme but, if you and the Local Agent(s) of Change you support are at the weekend, encourage them to attend.

Ending well

• The Local Agents of Change programme runs for one year, January to December. From each 3Generate we will be recruiting the next cohort of Local Agents of Change and Local Supporters to start in the following January. Children and young people can take part in the programme for as many years as they would like, and it is hoped that new elements will be built into the programme as it evolves.
• At the end of the year, you will be invited, as a Local Supporter, to offer feedback through an online survey and debrief meeting. As the programme evolves your thoughts on it would be much appreciated! Ahead of the debrief meeting, you are encouraged to speak with your Local Agent(s) of Change and get their thoughts on the experience, ready to feed that in.
• Please do think about how you and the church/circuit can mark the end of the year locally. A participation certificate will be available to print for each Local Agent of Change. Could this be given out in a church service or other event as a way of acknowledging the child/young person’s involvement?
• We would also encourage you to have a conversation with the Local Agent of Change about what they want to do next. Do they want to spend another year on the programme? Is there a role locally that they would like to volunteer for? If they’re old enough, would they consider applying to be on the Youth Rep programme or even standing for election as Youth President? What might God be calling them to? What skills have they evidenced during the year that can be used to serve?

Registering for the programme

Before registering as a Local Supporter on the programme, you will need:

• to have been ‘safer recruited’ through your local church (this means that your church has collected two references, asked for a DBS check and helped you to access the Foundational Safeguarding training)*
• to confirm that you have/will get permission from the parent/carer of each child/young person that you will be supporting as part of the programme (a template permission form is available as part of this guidance)

You will also need to provide contact details of your minister/ Superintendent, so that:

• we can check that the church/circuit is happy for you to proceed in the role
• we can ask the church/circuit to confirm that they will support both you as the Local Supporter and the Local Agent(s) of Change
• an idea of which of the two January briefings you would like to attend, from the choices offered on the registration form.

*If you are a parent/carer registering to support your own child/children only, please speak to your church to confirm how they would like to manage the safeguarding.

Communication

All communication with the Local Agents goes through you as the Local Supporter. You have a vital role in making sure that the children and young people taking part get all the relevant information they need. This will include:

• the ‘Use Your Voice’ consultation packs that will be published twice a year
• information about how Local Agents of Change feedback from their consultations via the online gatherings and forms
• opportunities to represent the voices of children and young people in other ways, which the Local Agents of Change may be interested in.

Registering for the online gatherings.

This will include:

• booking a place for each of the children and young people you support as a Local Agent of Change
• ensuring the proper parent/carer permission is in place for the Local Agent(s) of Change to participate on Zoom (see template permission form).

Other tasks:

• After each round of consultation/feedback, we will ask you to complete a short online form to help us gather data about the number of children and young people involved, ages, etc.
• At the end of the year, print off and organise for the certificates to be handed out (see paragraph in previous 'Key tasks' section on ending the year well).

How many Local Agents can I support?

You can support as many as you would like! Most of the supporting work could be done for five in the same time it takes to support one, so it wouldn’t be much more of a time commitment. However, there would be some minor admin tasks that would need to be done for each Local Agent, eg parental permission forms. If you have a number of young people wanting to be Local Agents you may like to create a small team of Supporters.

What is the time commitment?

The time commitment may vary depending on if/when the children/young people already meet. For example, when the consultation packs are released you will need to meet with your Local Agent(s) and discuss with them what they could do to hear from their peers. This meeting could take place in an already existing children’s/youth group meeting, or it may be that you need to meet specifically to talk about this. Depending on how they want to consult with their peers, this might be done within the already existing youth group, which would not create any extra time commitment from you. If the Local Agent wanted to organise something specific, like an online questionnaire, they may need some extra support from you. You may be required to support the young people as they feedback to the church, and you may need to contact the church leadership/church council occasionally to feedback. This role is not a weekly commitment, but twice a year when the consultation packs are released there will be some supporting work that you would need to do.

When does the programme start?

Local Supporters will register to be part of the programme between October and December, with the Local Agents of Change starting their role in January.

Can I start part-way through the year?

Ideally the cohort will start all together in January. If you have young people who would like to be involved part way through the year they could still use the consultation packs with their friends and feedback what they find. Information on how to do this will be in the packs when they are published.

What if we can’t make the online meeting?

It would be great if the Local Agents could prioritise the online meeting, but we do understand that this won’t always be possible. There will also be opportunity for feedback to be sent in electronically.

Can we have a team of Local Supporters, rather than just one?

Absolutely yes!

Will this cost anything? 

It won’t cost anything to sign up – there is no fee to pay and it should be that everything can be done without cost. It is possible that you may incur some expenses locally, depending on what you may organise, you will need to check with your local church/circuit as to whether they will reimburse such expenses.

Is there any merchandise?

Currently there is no merchandise, however this is something that might be offered in the future.

What happens with the feedback from the Local Agents of Change? 

The feedback from the consultations should be shared with the local church/circuit and there will also be opportunity to share it with the Youth President and Youth Reps via the online meetings. How your church/circuit responds to the feedback will be for your local church/circuit to decide. The Youth President and Reps will take the feedback and it will be incorporated into the report that is presented at Methodist Conference, which may shape the work of the Connexional Team as well as the wider Church.

What sorts of topics will the consultation be about?

This may vary – some of the topics will come from what the children and young people raise at 3Generate, some topics may come from consultations that the Methodist Church is holding, some may be general topics that are current in the church/society at the time.

This link will download a template permission form for you to edit in Word.

Download the form now.