"If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming"
- Goethe
young people's leadership academy
Introduction | Outcomes | Components | More information
What is the Young People's Leadership Academy?
The Columba 1400 Young People’s Leadership Academy is the core programme operated by Columba 1400. Typically, it brings together up to 12 young people and 3 support staff into one leadership development experience. Key learning areas are explored within topics of leadership and communication – organised under the Columban Code of Responsible Leadership. In addition to these core components, participants bring their personal values in to focus enabling them to recognise success and see their greatness. This learning from the residential component enables, on return to their community, identification of what needs to change, seeking support and utilising personal resources leading to action. This reusable cycle enables momentum to be gathered within the community to ignite change from within.
Participants enter a place where it is possible to glimpse different ways of being, to see all of what we are capable of – as individuals and as a community and to grasp our own greatness and what that could do for the world. By creating an environment that allows judgement to be challenged and suspended individuals can understand how to find the very best in themselves and others. Columba 1400 assumes that everyone who crosses our threshold is a leader and that within themselves they have everything they need to achieve their potential.
Programme Outcomes
Participants can expect, by the end of the residential component of the programme to have:
Awareness
Increasing awareness of themselves as leaders and better awareness of the potential in other.
Focus
An understanding of what is important and choosing to act on this
Creativity
A belief that cycles and patterns in your life can be changed
Integrity
Greater awareness of your own potential and remaining true to it
Perseverance
A sense of resilience in the face of challenges
Service
A belief that you can have a positive impact on your community
Programme Components
The desire to take part in the programme and the ability to commit to the pre residential preparation session and the residential component is important.
Initial Consultation with support staff
"What is Columba 1400?":
- To inform potential participants of the programme content and philosophy
- 2 hour session
Pre Residential Orientation
- Final preparations for residential in Skye
- 2 hour session
Residential
- 7 day intensive residential
- Columba 1400, Staffin, Isle of Skye, IV51 9JY
More information
Please contact Mark Brown, Programme Manager for Young Peoples' Leadership Academy, Columba 1400.
Click here to contact Mark Brown
background
Columba 1400’s Young Peoples Leadership Academy was first piloted in 2000 in partnership with the Greater Easterhouse Development Company (GEDC). Regarded as one of Glasgow’s most socially challenged areas, Easterhouse has been home to a proportionally high number of young people who are at risk of falling into the NEET category (Not in Education, Employment or Training). This made it an ideal place to launch the pilot Leadership Academy. In conjunction with the GEDC personal development scheme, What Other Way (WOW), Columba 1400 began to take young people from the Greater Easterhouse area to the centre in Staffin, and in the first year of the initiative alone, 33 of the 35 at-risk youngsters went on to full-time employment or education.
Since then, the Young Peoples Leadership Academy has been expanded to include young people from across Scotland, and many young people from tough realities including those leaving local authority care, have taken part in the programme to great success.