Asher and I had a interesting meeting with Ade Sofola of the Citizenship Foundation yesterday.
She leads on an interesting project at the Foundation – Youth Act, which supports groups of 11–18 year-olds to identify issues of concern to them and their communities and to develop campaigns to tackle them.
In terms of skills, this has a fair amount of crossover with what we’re trying to do in schools, and we both agreed that how we present democracy/political engagement/citizenship to young people is key to the success of our work. If it’s mixed up with some fun, some passion and some ‘greater good’ then it’s more likely to work.
We had an interesting discussion about how we might work together in the future, it will be interesting to see how this develops.
It’s always good to associate ourselves – and work with – organisations and projects that are engaging young people who don’t usually get engaged, rather than giving skills to those who always take part. This project definitely seems like it’s the former.
Anyway, here’s Ade talking about the importance of skills in her work:
(Ade hope you don’t mind me linking to this!):
Greg