Introducing Our New Liskeard Youth Group: Where it’s Okay to Be Quiet

A Space for Quiet Teens: New Liskeard Youth Group for those joining Years 10-13 this September

If you’ve ever watched a quieter teenager in a group setting, you’ll have seen the effort it can take. The scanning for a safe place to sit. The careful listening, the way their words might not quite make it out before the conversation moves elsewhere. The relief when it’s over, followed by the quiet dissection of everything that was said and wasn’t said. And possibly the decision that next time it might be easier to stay home.

Most social spaces for young people are built around the ones who find them easiest. The activities, the format, the expectation of participation… these tend to suit the ones who are louder, quicker to speak, and comfortable with attention. Perhaps because the young people who find group settings hard are also the ones least likely to say so, it means the spaces stay the same, and the quieter ones keep on having to cope the best they can. Meanwhile, years of small moments teaches them that their way of being is slightly inconvenient, and they ‘should be different’… but they can’t see how.

We think there’s a better answer than that. And our Ellie is exploring a new approach in Liskeard.

Ellie’s story

Ellie Zalick has led our Liskeard Meet Up since 2022. She is a psychology graduate, and she is leading this youth group for reasons that go well beyond a professional interest in the subject.

When Ellie was seven or eight years old, her class did an exercise where students were given photos of themselves and other students wrote words around the edges to describe them. When Ellie saw hers, it was covered in a single word, written over and over: quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet. One person had written “friendly.” That was it. She was creative, a committed writer who had built an entire fictional universe in her spare time, thoughtful, perceptive. None of that made it onto the page. She was seen for one thing only. And that’s an experience so many quieter young people can relate to.

Secondary school brought worse for Ellie. People would demand she speak, repeatedly, like being asked to perform a trick. She absorbed the idea that she was socially inept, that silence was a defect. But, over time, she learnt to use her voice on her own terms, by finding contexts that offered space and recognition for her strengths.

During her psychology placement year, she worked in children’s mental health services. She met a lot of quieter young people who were finding things hard but didn’t meet the threshold for clinical support. There was no obvious place to refer them. The gap between struggling and crisis is wide, and these young people were somewhere inside it, without much to hold onto.

This group is, in part, built for them.

What the research tells us

The experiences that lead quieter young people to doubt themselves look like a student who won’t contribute in class, who’s described as withdrawn, who drifts through the school day without much fuss. Inside, that student may be running a constant internal commentary about everything they’re doing wrong. They may have concluded, from years of small signals, that their temperament is somehow the wrong one.

One person in our community reflected that if she’d understood her introversion as a teenager, she would have chosen an entirely different life path. She discovered she was simply introverted at the age of fifty-two after decades of thinking she was ‘broken’. Another described how the pattern of missing school due to anxiety eventually ended in court appearances.

The research tells us that social anxiety typically begins in the early to mid-teens, and half of all mental health difficulties are established in teenage years. Having listened to the stories of hundreds of adults and young people, we think that, for quieter young people, receiving the message they they’re somehow wrong, and should be different is a large part of the cause of this. It’s the kind of thing that happens when there’s no space, early enough, that feels designed for you.

In our adult community, participants have reported an average eighty-one percent increase in self-acceptance and a seventy-six percent increase in sense of connectedness after engaging with Quiet Connections. But starting earlier matters.

What Friday looks like

On Friday 12 June 2026, from 6:45pm to 8:45pm, Ellie will open the Wheal Phoenix Room at Liskeard Public Hall for the first gathering of the Liskeard Youth Group. It’s for young people in Year Groups 10 to 13, and it’s free to attend.

This first session has no set agenda. That is intentional. Rather than arriving with activities already decided, we’re starting by asking young people what they actually want. What crafts or creative activities would genuinely interest them. What would make it easier to come back. What would make the first time feel manageable.

For those who’d rather not speak those thoughts aloud in a group, there’s an anonymous idea board. For those who’d rather sit quietly and see what the room feels like, that’s fine too. There are no icebreakers. Nothing has to be prepared in advance. Nobody will be asked to introduce themselves to the group or share something interesting about themselves. The evening moves at the pace of the people in it.

Ellie will be there from the start. She knows what it takes to try a new space when new spaces have let you down before, and she’ll make sure the room is ready before anyone walks in.

There will also be tea, hot chocolate, biscuits, and optional activities on the tables.

If you know a young person this might be for

The teenagers most likely to benefit from a group like this are often the ones who won’t seek it out themselves. They may have had experiences in group settings that felt exposing or uncomfortable. They may not have language yet for what they experience socially, only the knowledge that it takes a lot out of them. They may be doing well academically, or they may be finding that hard too, but either way, the social landscape of school is tiring in a way they find difficult to explain.

What often helps is someone they already trust saying that this one is different. Not a group where you’re expected to open up. Not a session where you’ll be asked to do things that feel uncomfortable. A room where quiet is genuinely welcome, led by a quiet adult who has been exactly where you are.

If you are a parent, a teacher, a school counsellor, a GP, a librarian, a youth worker, or anyone else who spends time with teenagers, you are in a position to make that introduction.

• You can share the webpage at quietconnections.co.uk/youth-group/
• Display a poster somewhere it might be seen
• Share a Facebook Post here:

Young people who can’t make the first session but want to have a say in shaping the group can contact Ellie at eleanor@quietconnections.co.uk.

On starting with young people’s ideas

We made a deliberate decision not to arrive at this first session with everything already planned. It would have been quicker. But a group that’s shaped around what its members actually want is a different thing from a group they’re fitted into, and we think that’s important, especially for young people who have often experienced community spaces as designed for someone else. We want to create spaces with our young quieteers.

Being asked what you think, and having that genuinely affect what happens next, is part of what belonging can feel like. We want this group to be that from the beginning.

If you’ll be in Year Groups 10 to 13 from September, and you’re reading this: come and see. You don’t need to know what you want from it yet, or have anything ready to say, or bring a confident, chatty version of yourself. Ellie will be there. The room will be quiet enough to take the time you need to reflect.

We’ll meet in the Wheal Phoenix Room, Liskeard Public Hall, Friday 12 June. Doors open at 6:45pm. Please message Ellie if you’d like a chat or have any questions before coming. We’ll do what we can to help you to feel at ease. Email eleanor@quietconnections.co.uk.

Find out more at: quietconnections.co.uk/youth-group.