Life skills workshops from the Green Hub Project for Teens

In addition to our garden, Green Hub runs Life Skills Workshops for Teens and our aim is to Empower, Inspire and Engage.

We cover a wide range of areas:

• Emotional intelligence
• Emotional resilience,
• How food may affect mood
• Study strategies
• The physiological benefit of exercise, sleep, water and food.
• How learning can be empowering and improve your confidence.
• Dealing with difficult or toxic friendships
• Social media management
• Sleep and settling the brain
• Strategies to manage being overwhelmed or unwanted thoughts.
• The relationship of posture and inner strength and wellbeing.
• How to find your coping strategies in unprecedented times
• And much more

Size and structure:

The workshops are rarely bigger than 15-20 students at the time, and we allow time for conversation, reflection and feedback. We run them like a business growth seminar and give the students space and air time as the most important feedback is what we hear from them. Each time we listen to what they need and then adapt the sessions accordingly. They get an opportunity to find their own goals to work on after each session.

Workshop leaders:

Our sessions leaders are all professionals who work with young people on a daily basis. They are chosen for their ability to engage and inspire others as well as connecting with this age group. The Feedback we have had from the attendees over the past five years has been incredible and incredibly rewarding to see. We do statistics from each sessions to know what is working and what is the most effective way to communicate. All leaders work voluntarily and any profits go towards the community project so we can further the work we do to support young people.

Young Ambassadors:

We often invite young ambassadors to share their own unique experience in life, and the talks we have had in the past have often been the most popular and powerful of the sessions. To hear how someone else has been affected, or overcome a challenging time is incredibly powerful and supportive. Our aim, after the pandemic,  is to be able to run a young person’s TED-style-talks in the future, where more students can come together in a positive way to learn about the subject above.

A message about workshops from Tone Tellefsen-Hughes, founder of the Green Hub Project for Teens…

As a chiropractor I see young people of all ages in my clinic and have had the unique opportunity to both work with them clinically, but also listen to, and start to understand what is going on in their lives and how this is affecting their minds and bodies.

I am also a paediatric chiropractor, Fellow of the pregnancy and paediatric faculty of the Royal College of Chiropractic. I feel honoured to be part of the Green Hub which now is comprised of the most talented and inspirational group of professionals from all over Surrey, who are all committed to find a way to empower and support young people.

After working for 30 years in my profession, I believe that the body-mind connection is intrinsically linked, and that stress and worry can translate in to tension in our physical bodies causing symptoms such as headaches, back and neck pain, but also symptoms of not being able to settle our minds. It has been incredible seeing how manual therapy can help to ease some of these issues, and thus helping the teens to feel more in tune with their bodies and starting to listen to what it is telling them. We are not getting more and more scientific studies backing this up, which is why we are both running the workshops but also the horticultural volunteering sessions for young people in the Green Hub garden.

The Surrey Teen Summit

My clinical work led me to start a group called the Surrey Teen Summit in 2015. We were a group of local professionals all working with teens in some way, who came together and created workshops for young people. The first session we run had 22 students from four counties, and as far away as Sweden and it was incredible to see them all coming in quite unsure of what we were going to do, and see them leaving with a glimmer in their eyes, upright postures and smiles on their faces. This led us to carry on for the next five years running workshops as diverse as yoga and mindfulness, craft and creativity, exercising in nature, study strategies, how to get an Olympic mindset and more.

Each workshop had a different theme, and the aim was to help young people learn about being reflective, listening to their bodies, and finding strategies to becoming more resilient in their lives. And learning together, so they see that they are not alone in feeling in a certain way. This gives confidence, that they are not experiencing this alone. This is what we are going to carry on offering in The Green Hub Project for Teens.

I have also had the incredible opportunity to do talks, assemblies and workshops in many state and private Schools in the South and have worked with more than 2.500 students in the past ten years. Each time I visit a school I learn about the issues they are facing in their daily lives, and their feedback then helps me to see what is currently going on in their minds and what issues they are dealing with.

This has in turn me to find new instructors to work with who can help deliver more workshops to help young people find the best strategies and resources to overcome any hurdles they may face. The Green Hub is our platform for running these workshops and we are incredibly excited to do this again after the pandemic.

As soon as we are able to, we will post details of future workshops.