Once a year Hope UK staff, volunteers, trustees and members of the youth branch (Generation Hope) get together for a weekend together.

This year more than 120 people met at All Nations College, Ware.

The older members of Generation Hope (those age 15-25) wanted longer to be together so they started their ‘weekend’ on the Thursday evening. Everyone else arrived from Friday lunchtime onwards.

We have some sessions and activities together – this year those included a welcome session on the Friday evening, a Magic Lantern show, a team games afternoon (it didn’t rain – hooray), as well as various worship sessions. We also played sardines, the Swedish newspaper game (!), went on a midnight walk and sang a lot….

At other times, there were optional sessions including a refresher course for volunteers, learning about gaming, teenage development, drug updates and more. We improved our knowledge about working with people with special needs, discussed how to develop our detached work, and looked at various issues in the bible.

We had visits from Julia Pascoe (Jews for Jesus), Matt Summerfield (Urban Saints) and Rob McLellan (Naked Truth), and a team from the Magic Lantern Society demonstrated Victorian visual aids (including a Victorian horror film).

Below are a few photos from the weekend – you can find more on our Facebook page (and even more will be posted soon – of people eating donuts without using their hands, running sack races and more…)