Carnegie Young People Initiative

The Carnegie Young People Initiative broadly welcomes the Power Inquiry, particularly its recommendations to lower the voting age to 16 and improve the quality of the Citizenship Education Curriculum in schools.

Our own work on promoting young people’s participation backs the findings of the Power Inquiry – young people are passionate about issues that concern them and although they welcome the chance to take part and make a difference, they are far less interested or indeed included in formal democratic processes.

However, we believe that if we are fully engage young people in politics, more needs to be done to help them experience real democracy as early as possible. This could be in the form of a school council or committee that has real decision making powers, or taking part in a youth forum that feeds into local government. Whatever the method, young people need to believe that their voices are listened to and can lead to real change.

Participation Works (www.participationworks.org.uk), a new online gateway launched today (26 October), will help all those wishing to increase children and young people’s involvement in public decision-making.

The gateway is the first interactive one stop shop on participation, enabling users to share expertise and access resources. It has been built by Chypp (the Children and Young People’s Participation Partnership), which is working to improve the effectiveness of children and young people’s participation.

At the click of a button users can search an array of topics, from research evidence, legislation and children’s rights to innovative ideas and training packages. The gateway will be updated regularly and continue to grow as more users share resources.

Chypp believes that children and young people’s voices should not only be heard but that they should actually make a difference.

Carnegie – “Make sure listening to children and young people is not a four year fad!?

Carnegie Young People Initiative welcomes the early signs coming from the Prime Minister that he intends to learn from the election result and spend more time listening to messages voters are sending to the government.

Carnegie launches ‘Making it Count’ – improving the ways government listens to children and young people

Carnegie Young People Initiative – part of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust – has launched a programme of work that will help civil servants to find longer term solutions to listening and responding to children and young people’s views.

‘Making it Count’ will set up groups of officials in three government organisations, across the UK. The first project to begin is based in DEFRA.

The DEFRA group will run for 9 months. The group is made up of officials in policy areas that impact upon the lives of children and young people. They represent the following policy areas: Communications; Food Chain Analysis and Farming Regulation; Climate, Energy and Environmental Risk; Strategy and Sustainable Development; Food Industry and Crops; Environment Protection Strategy.