New Telephone Advocacy Service for Young People in Wales
MEIC
On May 14th the Welsh Assembly Government launched a new service for young people in Wales called MEIC. WAG is putting £450,000 into this project, which is an advocacy service that will provide information and help when children and young people up to the age of 25. They can access it when they need information and help to get in contact with people who can advise them on specific problems and difficulties. MEIC can be contacted on free phone 080880 23456, free text 84001 or instant message seven days a week. Initially, MEIC will run for 8 hours a day from 12 to 8pm before becoming a 24-hour service.
More details are available on:
http://wales.gov.uk/newsroom/childrenandyoungpeople/2010/100514helpline/?lang=en
Some examples of the things that MEIC can help with are:
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If a facility or service used by young people changes or stops,
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If a young person doesn’t feel they have been treated fairly
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If a child or young person has been excluded from a service but they don’t feel it was their fault
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If a young person feels they are not getting anywhere with a service and when they feel that nobody is listening to their point of view but making decisions regardless.
There is a difference between MEIC and ChildLine. MEIC provides advocacy and advice, ChildLine provide a counselling and support service for children and young people. Counselling and Advocacy are different things, counselling is about listening to a child or young person’s issue, providing emotional support and possibly methods for coping, managing and or changing the situation. Advocacy is about supporting children and young people to be involved in things that affect them and/or decisions that are made about them – very often it is to stop, start or change something.
The way in which MEIC will work is that advocates will talk through the issue with young person and they will decide together on a course of action. The advocate will work towards supporting and empowering the young person to deal with the issue themselves. However when this is not possible, the advocate will offer to make contact on the young person’s behalf. An Advocate cannot always resolve an issue in favour of the young person. Most young people are fine with this as long as they understand the process, are involved, their opinions truly taken into account, and understand why the alternative outcome was reached.
Let us know what you think of this new service:
Is this money well spent on a much-needed service for young people?
Have there been times when you could have benefited from such a service?
Do you think that ChildLine offered sufficient support and this is duplication?
What other services do you think are needed for young people in Wales?