YMCA Campaigners Visit Parliament

Young people from YMCAs across England visited parliament, lobbied MPs and developed their campaigning skills, as part of YMCA England and Y Care International's Changing Your World course.

Changing Your World is an innovative training course that gives young people the skills to be young campaigners, and make a difference in their communities and across the world.

Young people from three YMCAs - Kingston and Wimbledon YMCA, West London YMCA and St Jude's YMCA in Northampton - took part in the three-day course in London.

One of their challenges was to come up with campaign ideas to take back to their YMCAs and put into action.

The young people from Kingston and Wimbledon came up with a campaign about the difficulty young people have securing private rented accommodation under the banner of 'If I don't get a rent deposit, I'll be living in a closet!'

Other campaigns the young people developed included 'Education 4 All', a campaign to improve education for disadvantaged young people, 'Cum Clean', a campaign to get a drug assessment worker based in Kettering, 'Y No Way Out', a campaign for rent deposit schemes and reform of the benefits system, 'Women Ask Y', a campaign to improve sexual health services in west London.

The young people also visited parliament to sit in on debates in the Lords and the Commons.

They also lobbied MPs and Peers about issues that they feel strongly about.

Baroness Jenny Tonge spoke to the group about her work on the Middle East and Ed Davey, MP for Kingston and Surbiton - and patron of Kingston and Wimbledon YMCA - listened to the young people's views on rent deposits and the 16-hour rule.

At the end of the course, each young person spoke about how much they had learned from the course, and what they intended to take back to put into action at their YMCA.

The next Changing Your World will take place in October and all young people from YMCAs are invited to take part.

Contact stephen.matthews@england.ymca.org.uk or celine.grey@ycareinternational.org for more details.

Young people who are particularly interested in campaigning on youth justice are invited to attend the Y Care International conference, Rough Justice for Young People from Saturday 30 June - Monday 2 July.