Leadership And Friendship From Preston IMPACT Group Retreat

Last month the Preston IMPACT! Group took the time to hold a residential at Castlerigg Manor in the Lake District, in order to enjoy some time together, run workshops and reflect on their own realities.

The theme for the weekend was ‘SHARING VOICES’ and included a number of workshops and reflection, which were all led by young people on the weekend. This gave them the responsibility to lead and discuss the issues that they felt the need to have a voice on.

Some of these topics included debates about education, workshops on mental health and how to talk more openly about it and also about refugees.

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Time was also given over the weekend to prayer and reflection in the Chapel. Again, the young people were given responsibility to look at the themes for prayer around “thanking God”, “saying sorry to God” and “asking God”, which allowed them to more deeply understand how God loves us and wants to be with us on our journey through life.

Throughout the weekend, it was really important to encourage the young people to build friendships with each other and there were plenty of fun activities organise by the Group to help deliver this.

One of the young people on the residential who helped organise the weekend, Hallie, reflected on it saying: “Over the weekend, we had learnt so, so much from each other and from ourselves. The weekend had brought so much to each of us either as a group or as individual people. Our eyes had been opened to new things that we hadn’t realised, seen or been aware of before.

I’d like to say thank you to everybody for making this weekend a truly special one and one that I will remember, thank you to all the new friends I made and a huge thank you to all the staff and leaders, especially to Terry for making the whole thing work!”