UK Parliament Week is an annual week long campaign of events to engage people across the UK and empower them to get involved with Parliament. The #ukparliamentweek hashtag has been a source of inspirational messages, images and films of conversations all over the UK this week about the work of parliament, of our parliamentarians and how people can be involved. From Paddington in Parliament to a lego suffragette social media has been abuzz with all things parliament.
Parliament Week gives an excellent opportunity to design and deliver conversations in schools and other settings that explore politics, parliament and our participation with children and young people. A great time to create a little extra noise about what parliament does and could mean to you and your community by connecting with politicians, campaigners and activists.
Many of our other partners in the programme have been busy this week too. The Politics Project have been extra busy running Digital Surgeries for young people with their MPs all over the country, and closer to home with our own GM Mayor (and former Parliamentarian) Andy Burnham busy fielding questions on Thursday from students in Bolton and Trafford.
An abundance of great resources have been developed and shared to support people to do this – many of which we hope to feature in our Rise Voice Vote Toolkit (watch this space, coming early 2019!!).
“Celebrating our past, Understanding our present, Participating in our future…”
Our Rise Voice Vote project is using this centenary year (of some women getting the vote) to have similar conversations with young people, about participation and their activism and campaigning. So in Parliament Week our fabulous facilitators Beth from PIE and Hebe of The Proud Trust at co-op Academy North (formerly MCMA) delivering our schools session with young people to further develop their campaigns following their trip to the Pankhurst Centre.
15 schools and community youth groups are now involved in the Rise Voice Vote programme with nearly 200 young people aged 10-19 visiting The Pankhurst Centre since June. On 26th November we will welcome over 125 young people to the People’s History Museum for a campaign hackday to develop their campaigns through a range of creative campaigning sessions.
Andy is answering questions from students in Bolton and Trafford this lunchtime. We are living in the future!