Young People in care get together on Minecraft for an interactive event

This year, we have taken our annual ‘Young Person’s Voice’ event to Minecraft to ensure young people continue to get their views heard.

Events throughout this pandemic all over the world have been cancelled or moved online over video chat. Normally, our ‘Young Person’s Voice’ event gets taken 'on the road' to each of our local offices using a mix of fun and games, whilst discussing the issues that young people in care have and how we can adapt to that change.

This year, however, we have adapted to the current pandemic by safely hosting the event on a secure server in Minecraft, to keep the essence of fun whilst learning throughout the event. It allowed young people to talk about things from their perspective and helped us learn more about their needs and views.

The entire Minecraft level was created to look like our office based in Ringwood by a young person cared for by one of our Foster Carers which piqued the young people’s interest.

Blue Sky Foster Carer, Orlanda Cooper, whose young people attended the event, said:

"This was the first time my children got involved in the young person’s voice and they loved it! They had done similar things with our previous agency and they hated doing it as it was just filling out some forms. The Minecraft session was a whole different thing. It was fun, challenging, and interactive, the children came away from it buzzing!”

Our Training & Participations Manager, Ed Thompson, who organises the event, said:

“We came up with a plan to make a Minecraft Blue Sky Office (an actual replica of our Ringwood office) and to invite all our young people to join us for 2 sessions of games and questions.

“Now, this was a huge task, we hadn’t done anything like this before and there wasn’t a “template” for what to do, but we are blessed with some great minds in both our staff and young people.”