Talk Up Yout School Tour
THE CHALLENGE
In Jamaica, children and adolescents face serious issues in silence. Spaces for youth voice are limited.
THE OUTCOME
A safe, supportive space for students to speak up about the issues affecting them, in the presence of stakeholders.
For this project I I joined the Talk Up Yout Team to work with students in high schools across Jamaica to record their perspectives on issues affecting them and produce a series of articles and reports with recommendations for action on the part of stakeholders.
The Talk Up Yout School Tour is a series of youth engagement sessions in different high schools across Jamaica. In each school students are brought together, townhall-style with a grade representative highlighting issues they face before the floor is opened for any student to raise an issue or respond to ones already highlighted. Students are also led through solutions-generating exercises where they can tell their teachers, guidance counselors and government/civil society organizations what changes they want to see. Towards the end of each session the moderator, usually Talk Up Yout Executive Producer and media maven Emprezz Golding, leads the students through an empowerment session.
The project aims to open safe space for youth expression, where students can talk up about all the issues they care about, regardless of how difficult or taboo or seemingly trivial they might be. Before each tour I worked with school administrators and grade representatives to get a sense for the various issues students face, develop a programme for the session to ensure these issues would be addressed by the moderator and form the backbone of reports from the sessions. I also worked with students to support them in articulating the issues they wanted to share to encourage them to take full advantage of the sessions.
“With a variety of social & emotional issues affecting our youth, the tour allows the students to be less isolated as they work on their issues, and helps the youth to realize that they are not alone in their struggles.”
Not only has the project created a model for youth engagement in Jamaica, drawn attention to serious issues affecting youth including helping parents to understand these issues, in-parish youth service organizations routinely report an uptick in students accessing their services after each session. Insights from the projects have also been used to develop services and projects for youth both within the organization and externally. Project videos, created from my reports outlining particularly significant moments have sparked conversations both online and off and student and school feedback has remained overwhelmingly positive.