Humanutopia comes to Oaks Park
Oaks Park High School had the pleasure of hosting a workshop for their Year 11 students which was hosted by the Humanutopia team.
Many people may be wondering the exact question that entered my mind when I entered the workshop on an early Monday morning: ‘What is Humanutopia anyway?’ Well, Humanutopia aims to help students with their confidence, happiness, employability and relationships. They provide many different types of workshops but, in Oaks Park they hosted the one day workshop. This covered the topics of: confidence, happiness, and relationships.
It allowed for our year group to become closer, especially as they spoke about the topic of ‘whose bin gets filled’, essentially prompting students to open up about experiences that they have had to go through and how they were affected by said experiences. They also increased several people’s confidence by putting everybody in to groups and having us do different activities in the group.
They also shared the inspirational story of a young boy who had come to the UK under difficult circumstances and was bullied by his peers so much that he would stay silent for days on end. The boy had then attended a Humanutopia workshop with the rest of his year group and told them his story. This quickly changed the way that he was treated and allowed for him to become confident enough to sing in front of his peers. Humanutopia helped him become confident enough to tell his story, ultimately ending in his life changing for the better.
The overall view of anyone who attended the conference was positive as it allowed for people to think deeper about how you actions can affect someone more than you think. I asked another student, Saima Baig, how she found the workshop. She replied that “The workshop was a very good experience for me. It allowed our year group, as a whole, to become more open and trusting which each other. Whilst also making us realise that there is more to life to getting good grades.’
All in all, I (and many of my peers) believe that the Humanutopia workshop allowed the year group to not only understand how something may affect someone else due to other things that may be going on in their lives, whilst also helping students with their confidence. The workshop allowed for something different to our everyday routine which meant that our entire attention for the Monday was on working on ourselves as people and helping to support our peers with problems that we might not have known about. Here is a link to their website if you would like to do any further research yourself: https://www.humanutopia.com/
Shanzay Yousaf
