23 November was 11 Million Takeover Day, where the 11 million children and young people in England had the chance to take over from adults for the day. Here, Vinay, Novjita and Hana, three young people from a UNICEF Rights Respecting School, write about working alongside the Executive Director of UNICEF UK, David Bull, for the day.
Our day at UNICEF UK head office in Holborn was incredible. We met David Bull, the Executive Director of one of the world’s leading children’s charities. We shadowed him to see what it would be like to be him and head this amazing organisation for one day. It was a great experience! The whole day went very smoothly, it was also very beneficial; we didn’t really know what we were going to do there, we had a general idea, on the other hand, the experience was nothing like we had thought it would be.
We, Novjita, Hana, myself, all thought that the trip to UNICEF was going to be like some kind of workshop, with students from other schools, however there were only us three teenagers and it was nothing like a workshop. It was called “Takeover Day,” and we had all thought this meant a whole bunch of teenagers from different schools had to get together and run a certain programme or event and present it to members and workers for the company at the end.
What really happened was...
We first arrived at “Africa House” at around 9.30am. We were introduced to a couple of UNICEF workers, and had a tour of the building looking around and discovering that UNICEF UK is a huge organisation with lots of people working for it. We soon ended up at David Bull’s office and had a chat about how the day was planned, we then went to a meeting about the budget and the plans for 2008, it was really a fascinating experience because being in a real board meeting was amazing (even though we hardly understood what the UNICEF colleagues were talking about), however, now we know what to expect from “board meetings” in the future. Hana at least was brave enough to ask a question, Novjita and myself remained pretty silent.
Once the meeting was over, we headed towards UNICEF’s media department where we sat at computer desks like real workers and investigated issues about social networking that could be included in a speech that David Bull will be making in the future. This was a good experience as we got to do research ourselves and other people had to rely on us, rather than us relying on our teachers to do things for us. This was also good because Villiers is a “Learning To Learn” school which means students find ways of teaching themselves so they can become sophisticated, independent learners.