Celebrating Young People: Revival 2024

This year we launched Celebrating Young People: Revival (CYPR), a project that seeks to put youth voice at the heart of change in communities. We worked with seven schools over the year, seeking to better understand young people's perspectives on issues that affect them within their communities. We have taken them on a learning journey to consider how young people can effect change through social action, prayer, and dialogue.

The 6 steps of CYPR have allowed an open platform for students to speak up and be heard. These steps have included asking questions directly, rather than presuming answers. The responses we received have been insightful, honest and challenging.

Importantly, at each stage, the young people's responses have been fed back to each school to give an understanding and perspective on the issues their students are concerned about. The young people have followed, not only by praying for some of theses issues, but also looking at what Catholic Social Teaching says on some of these topics. We also recorded a webinar with young leaders, to ask them about the importance of leadership, and how it feels for them to be inspiring others to be a change in the communities around them.

We celebrated the sixth step of our programme 'Dialogue', with an event at St Vincent's MissionHub in Sheffield. This was an opportunity to thank, encourage and celebrate the young people who were a part of this year's CYPR programme. We spent some time reflecting on the issues that had been raised over the previous steps, affecting both their local communities and the rest of the world. We delved deeper by looking at how young people can - and already are - making positive changes within schools, communities and the world. By calling the group to action in this way, it gave them the opportunity to look at and start planning what could be done to make change within the communities around them.

We hope to continue building relationships with Catholic schools, colleges and students over the next year, journeying with them and continuing to accompany them, guided by their voices on what young people want, need and feel is important to them.

We wish to thank our 7 schools that we have journeyed with this year, as well as Pax Christi and the Diocese of Hallam Youth Ministry for their collaboration and partnership.

We will be running our CYPR programme again over the next academic year. We are currently looking for schools and partners to work with us on this project. For more information contact bernie@millionminutes.org.