Update on Movement Building - Youth Workshops

Our movement building circle has been running lots of workshops and events aimed at young people who are interested in climate action and social justice. We’ve also been running a series of youth assemblies for school children, as part of our Solar Schools project - read more about them in our update on Power to the People.

Youth Workshop on CoP26

We collaborated with the National Youth Council of Ireland to host an all day youth workshop on the COP26 UN Global Climate Talks. The workshop brought together young people from across Ireland to learn how the COP Climate Talks work and how young people can make their voices heard. We heard directly from young people who have attended previous UN Climate Talks bringing in Irish, European and international perspectives.

We were joined by a graphic harvester who captured some of the emerging themes from the day. You can see some of these images below and in this blog which also includes some recordings from the day. We were also joined by Favour Odusola and Karen Aguiar representing the Go Dance for Change platform who led us through an afro dance breakout to ignite our creativity and alert us to alternative methods of communicating about climate justice issues and connecting with one another.

System:Reset

Young people have been coming together through our System Reset project to explore the root causes of climate change and inequality. They’ve come up with solutions to these big issues to be raised with political leaders.
We showcased these solutions during our System Reset National Youth Assembly on 19th October where we also celebrated the launch of a youth position paper. This paper has been developed by young people, for young people - it has an exciting vision for a just, more equitable and sustainable world. We were joined by two politicians during the Assembly, Senator Lynn Boylan and MEP Ciarán Cuffe who responded to questions from youth participants on a range of climate and social justice issues.

Our System Reset project has also been exploring how dance can be used as a tool for activism and movement building. Go Dance for Change have been showing us how their form of activism is embedded in cross cultural exchanges and can amplify voices and build connection! It’s been a real joy to collaborate with this exciting, transcultural group and to run workshops with them.

Image Credits: We are grateful to Iris Aghedo who created the System Reset illustrations used in this blog. We are also grateful to Stephanie Heckman who created graphics to capture notes from our COP26 youth workshop.

Funding Acknowledgement: Our System Reset activities have been organised with the financial support of the European Union and Irish Aid. The views expressed as part of these events are those of the authors and not necessarily those of our funders.