On the 23^{rd of} March, we joined the very first Norfolk Youth Summit meeting after school. The Norfolk Youth Summit is a gathering of schools online across Norfolk, to discuss and debate important issues and topics around the world, for example equality and climate change.

In this meeting, we got together as a group representing the diversity and different opinions of teenagers in Norfolk. The meet was hosted by Miss Wasserberg – a teacher from Norwich High School and author of ‘Foxlowe’. This specific get-together was focused on the ability to express yourself and your thoughts through poetry. Before it, we were given the task to create 4 lines of poetry, based on where we came from, our interests and our hobbies. Everybody came to the meeting with these lines prepared, which would help us with the task of creating a communal poem about where we came from as a whole. In order to do this, we were each split into subgroups with other schools where we shared our poetry and therefore part of our backgrounds. Then, once everyone had been given the opportunity to share, we began to collectively work together in order to create a poem that blended all of our backgrounds together, representing all of us. Finally, we all joined back up together in one large group, where we put combined all the poems we had created as students to make one representative poem (can see at end). This was read out by Miss Wasserberg, and we were all extremely happy with what we had made, as it portrayed all of us from Norfolk in one piece.

Overall, we think that this was a very eye-opening experience to see how many backgrounds and cultures there are in Norfolk, and it was a really enjoyable afternoon. As the meeting went on, we also began to feel more confident in expressing our feelings on the topic as a whole, which helped to bring us together and therefore create a more powerful and true poem. This summit was great, and we look forward to the next one!