My view on The Promise Young Collaborators Project – Zoey

In 2022, funded by The Life Changes Trust, Aberlour Children’s Charity established The Promise Young Collaborators Project. This project was created to work with care experienced young people supported by Aberlour to explore what The Promise is and what it means to them and how best we can help other children and young people know about and understand The Promise. 

Below one of our Young Collaborators, Zoey, shares her experience of the project and her hopes for the project’s animation. 

What is The Promise?  

That was the question asked to me at the start of January 2022 and I only had little knowledge of what The Promise was then due to working with Aberlour for so long and being in Aberlour Youthpoint since I was 14 being able to take the chance to be so involved in a project with an organisation that means a lot to me I accepted right away. 

The beginning of the project was a whole new experience. Myself and three other young people were invited to create an interview panel to meet the candidates [to be the project coordinator] and personally interview them ourselves as we’d be working very closely with them for the next year. That’s where we met Matthew. His passion, drive and ideas for the project made him the perfect fit for what we, the young people, were looking for. 

The project fully began in February when we started to meet up every week to learn about The Promise and the five pillars it’s built on which are Family, Care, People, Scaffolding and Voice. When we began working on our project. We knew already what pillar we were focusing our project on which was Voice. We had to discover a way to share our message on why the voice of young people is so important to their growth and future. 

We settled very quickly on the idea of a short animation not long afterwards and that’s when the project really started to get going and the creativity we had started to show. We wanted to create something that not just Aberlour could use but every youth charity and support group in Scotland can use to inspire young people and share our message on why their Voice is so important and how they can become more confident using it. 

Work towards the animation began fully in August and that’s when we started to meet different groups and companies who could make our animation come real for us. We chose Mallard Productions who have worked with Aberlour closely before so we were very happy to work with them due to all the good things we’ve heard and seen from previous projects and talking to the team we had full confidence that they would bring our ideas to life. 

Being invited to AbJam 2022 was an incredible experience for us to share our project and being able to deliver a presentation to the young people and staff of Aberlour was a whole new experience as it was the largest group of people, we talked to about the project so far to date. The feedback and support we received that day inspired us to deliver the best project we could. 

Being able to put our voice towards the animation was incredible. Going to Mallard’s office to meet the team and bring life to our idea was a whole new experience and being able to hear it back in our released video has been fantastic. I’ve loved this whole experience and I’d easily do it again if asked. 

To finish off I want to say thank you to Aberlour for giving me this opportunity to talk about my experience in the project and allowing me to share this story. And a special thank you to Matthew who was an incredible person to work with throughout last year, we wouldn’t have got to where we did without your support. 

Zoey