Youth Panel

The Museum of English Rural Life hosts the Youth Panel on Thursday 19 November, from 16:30 to 18:00. It's a session for young people aged 14 to 18, led by Sarah Barnsley, and it's part of a wider programme run by Museums Partnership Reading. The focus this time is on creative writing and book design workshops, so if you're in that age group and fancy spending a couple of hours working with words and layouts, this is the one.

To get a sense of what the Youth Panel is, it helps to know where it came from. It grew out of the Youth Manifesto project, which started when feedback suggested museums needed more activity tailored to teenagers. Over two years, the panel produced a manifesto and a short documentary made with 40 young people across Greater Reading and Real Time Film, using participatory video to ask how they experience and engage with museums and heritage. Since then, it's become a regular thing: members meet on the third Thursday of each month, except August, and act as change-makers in Reading's culture and heritage sector, influencing current projects and programming.

That's not just a fancy way of saying they talk — they actually make things. Past work includes a Dungeons and Dragons universe inspired by the MERL collections, Jane Austen 250 workshops, and the 'Digital Dig' with the Royal Horticultural Society. They curated the Festival 50 exhibition, which marked the 1971 Reading Festival, and helped design 'The Nook at The MERL', a new social learning space. It's a programme that treats young people as contributors rather than just visitors, and this workshop is one of the ways they get stuck in.

The session runs from 16:30 to 18:00 at The Museum of English Rural Life, Redlands Road, Reading, RG1 5EX. It's free, but you do need to book by emailing merlevents@reading.ac.uk.