The Mission

As part of the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth’s (MCCY) commitment to building a youth-centric space and community in the Somerset Belt (Somerset, Orchard area), we were engaged to support the agency in deepening affinity amongst youth through an initiative that would:

1. Meaningfully showcase Somerset’s spaces, experiences and stakeholders
2. Expose youths to new perspectives around their interests and concerns
3. Facilitate learning, connection and ideation through innovative formats
   

Our Brain Juice Approach‍

We wanted the Somerset Dialogues series of events to be truly community-driven, relevant and exciting — re-imagining what youth engagement could be. To achieve this, we designed and stayed true to our “youth for youth” approach. By recruiting youth ambassadors to be part of our team, conducting deep research through a social media audit, youth survey and community map, we were able to drive a process that not only helped us form a strong foundation for the 6 engagement events but also one that reflected the purpose of MCCY’s wider effort. In signature Brain Juice fashion, we also ensured that every event had interactive activities, contagious creative energy and most importantly, unforgettable fun! ‍

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Our Role

• Attracting youth ambassadors to build diversity of perspectives and opportunities for the target community to get involved right from the start.
• Designing and facilitating capacity-building workshops to strengthen our new Somerset Dialogues team.
• Collecting and analysing data from our youth survey and social media audit to discover interests and sentiments from the community.
• Developing an intuitive web-based community map that outlined the relevant spaces, businesses, groups, initiatives and individuals that could be engaged in any Somerset Belt effort. 
• Creating 6 memorable learning and conversation experiences around youth interests.
  

Our Impact 

• 31 youth ambassador applicants, 16 successfully chosen and onboarded
• 300+ survey respondents, 17k data points
• >10 focus group discussions with students, young professionals, policymakers, industry leaders from Decathlon, Design Orchard, Love, Bonito and more
• 290+ assets identified through our community map
• 6 successful events with 335 participants, 23 speakers engaged across 3 months

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