Carnegie Young Peoples Initative (CYPI) is a programme of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, set up to increase the influence children and young people have over decisions that affect them. We are fully funded by the Trust and work across the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Our values
We believe that the views of children and young people should be respected. That means that their rights under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child should be recognised, that their opinions be given due weight, and that through expressing their views they make change happen. We often call this ‘participation’. For their voices to lead to positive outcomes, children and young people often need to work well with adults and organisations. That is why CYPI works to support not only children and young people, but practitioners and organisations seeking to change the way they work. Bringing about the cultural change necessary to help children and young people realise their rights requires new partnerships and new ways of thinking and acting, and CYPI exists to lead these changes.
How we make a difference
CYPI has made a major impact in children and young people’s participation by targeting each of the groups mentioned above.
Children and Young People – through the Trust we have funded 100s of grassroots projects that work to involved children and young people in decision making and young people are involved in the governance of CYPI (read more)
Practitioners – we run an England-wide network for practitioners seeking to improve the way they support children and young people in influencing decision-making (read more), and we fund similar networks in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We have published research reports identifying good practice from across the UK, Ireland and internationally.
Organisations – we are piloting innovative ways of embedding children and young people’s participation in the way Government department work, and in the devolved administrations. We have also published pathfinding reports on organisational standards, measuring the impact of participation, and on how to improve the participation ‘infrastructure’.
CYPI has funding from the Trust until March 2007 and until then are co-ordinating a consortium of organisations to improve the way the voluntary, community and statutory organisations support children and young people’s involvement. A core part of this is a collectively maintained online gateway, with shared resources, good practice cases, networks, research evidence, organisational standards and training materials (read more).
