The Living Charter for Youth Rights in Greater Manchester.
I have recently been asked to get involved with a piece of work supported by Manchester Metropolitan University and SICK! Festival as Artistic Director.
Our Starting Point is a provocation.
For young people’s lives to be valued, what needs to change?
We are at the starting point of this exciting and important project where a new group aged between 15 and 30 years from Greater Manchester will come together between April and October to design, make, create and share their voice. The group will lead the project and will chose how they share a living representation of a Youth Charter.
What needs to change and how, as a group, they will start to change it?
This new collective will work alongside youth workers, facilitators and artists from varied fields including, Radio, Comedy, Visual and Digital Arts. We will build a platform for the messages to be shared, debate health, education, politics, housing and employment to name but a few and have a say at a number of events across the year.
Experimenting with the ‘living Charter for Youth Rights’
We have already been invited to deliver at MMU’s collaboration and co-production conference in June and we will also be involved with designing and delivering the work produced as part of the SICK! Festival in October.
Most importantly is that we are starting from a point of not knowing the answers yet, the group is taking shape and will create its own agenda as it evolves.
This is very much at the heart of Detached Youth work for me and at this challenging moment in our youth work history I feel it’s very important that we are led by our young people, as they are the experts of their lives, we are just the witnesses.