On Thursday the 22nd of November, five students from DCC travelled to Balbriggan for a workshop with St Vincent De Paul. It was held in the Sunshine House from 9am-2:30pm.
Young SVP come to schools and hold workshops around Ireland informing us on zero poverty and poverty in Ireland.
First of all, we were divided into colour coded groups and made badges with our names on them. We then got split up into groups and did a get to know your group activity. The groups were made up of different schools from across the whole Dublin region.
The first speaker did an introduction to SVP and poverty in Ireland. They encouraged us to participate in the talk by asking us questions and getting our groups’ opinions on the different topics. They gave everyone a piece of paper with a small paragraph on it. Everyone had to read it and see how many f’s they saw in the paragraph. Some people saw 3 whereas others saw 8. The real number of f’s was 6. They told us this was because of our blind spots. We have 250,000 blind spots and these cause our brains to shut out information that is not of value to us.
With the information they gave to us, we then had to present the workshop to the 1st years in our school. It was very enjoyable as we all had an interest in SVP and all contributed to making a presentation for the 1st years.
We would all like to thank Ms. Sheehan for selecting us to go on this talk as we all learned something new and we hope to work with them in the future.
By Leah Nolan and Ellen Laforgue, TY Journalism.