Social Rights for All
Participant: Sean Pettis
Organisation: Public Achievement, Northern-Ireland
Small Group of youth riot at a Belfast 'interface'
Project idea in brief
The aim of may project is to support 18 young people from 3 disadvantaged communities in Belfast to identify important social rights issues and undertake four action projects that seeks to address their issue as means to increase young people’s active participation, awareness of human rights and understanding of political processes and structures.
The project will have 3 distinct phases:
1. Develop 3 separate groups in Belfast of approx' 18 young people from Protestant, Catholic and Ethnic Minority Backgrounds.
2. Initially, work will be undertaken separately. Each group will pick an important issue that affects them in their community (e.g drugs, housing health etc). They will devise a project to tackle some aspect of their issue and then make this project public to the wider community. They will upload any project information onto the www.wimps.org.uk website. This process will take up to 20 weeks and will begin in February 2010.
3. Young people from each of the groups will be invited to undertake a residential, where they will share their projects and critique them together. At this point the young people should undertake their own project or campaign around a joint issue they feel is important. The young people will take responsibility for the project, with some background support from me and other colleagues. I hope to encourage them to meet with at least the Edinburgh and Dublin Groups to share their experiences
Social rights addressed: The face to face work with young people has not yet begun, however the project is essentially around the young people themselves selecting a social right that they consider important, and creating an action project to address it. Seen in a broader context the project will be the outworking of several social and human rights –for example Article 12 of the UNCRC and Article 7 of the European Social Charter. This approach is centred on young people’s active participation and social responsibility.
Target group: The target group is 18 young people from 3 different community backgrounds: Protestant/Unionist; Catholic / Nationalist; and Ethnic Minority aged 14-16 years old all of whom live in disadvantaged communities in Belfast.
Local authorities involved: As of yet we have not been in touch with any local authority. This will be initiated by the young people after they have begun the process of exploring issues and selecting one. At this stage we will also contact our local CLRA representative.
The current stage of the project: We are currently applying to the EYF to part fund the residential aspects of the programme. I have also done preparatory work with 2 other staff members who will undertake the majority of the face-face work with the young people. The 3 groups will begin work in February 2010.
