Just prior to the COVID shutdown, on January 13, 2020, UCY hosted the Advancing to Our Brave New World event. Since then activities have all been online with the first big event being the Child Friendly Community Conference from Nov. 20 to 22nd. The conference was inspired by June Girvan who for years has brought attention to November 20th, the day the United Nations has established as World Children’s Day, by having Ottawa mayors proclaim Ottawa to be a child friendly city/community.
Prior to the conference, on Nov. 4th, I spoke on behalf of UCY at the International Democratic Education Conference – IDEC. These activities led to a person in India and another in Finland contacting me about starting a Global UCY. Many follow-up meetings and presentations have led to the establishment of a Youth Rights Day to be celebrated along with World Children’s Day, which was created to commemorate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
UCY has created its own website to help promote the Youth Rights Day and to serve as a guide for people wanting to produce similar sites to suit people speaking different languages and living in in different cultures. The primary theme of the day, as promoted by UCY, is:
mental health = social justice + self-determination
These core components of mental health are taken from the website of the Ottawa branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association and correspond with the founding values of UCY, equity, inclusion and youth agency.
To develop and promote the Youth Rights Day, I have presented as a representative of UCY during these past months at major conferences including those of the Planetary Health Alliance, the Alternative Education Resource Organization, the Summerhill Festival of Childhood, the Un/Learning Festival and the Global Online Educational SWOT-1 Summit. I’ve also attended and participated in numerous other conferences, webinars and endless zoom meetings.
Unschooling School is an organization that was founded by members of the Alternative Education Resource Organization – AERO. It is pro public education and saw COVID as an opportunity to advance in public education the self-directed democratic model that is seen as the future of education. I was a founding member of Unschooling School and brought to it the UCY focus. Tom D’Amico, the director of the Ottawa Catholic School Board has been following the activities of Unschooling School and asked me to put together a few of its members to advise him and top staff about how to better serve students coming out of COVID. His team has since developed The HOPE Program and continues to consult with us.
On behalf of UCY, I have partnered with PEACE on a project with a high school student to portray youth as capable and responsible. As a result of the project, the student has produced three short videos of youth serving as wonderful ambassadors for young people. These videos are included on the Voices of Youth page on the Youth Rights Day website to, in addition to changing public conceptions of youth, provide youth with examples of good citizenship.
Recently an international team of which I was a member produced a response to the UNESCO Futures of Education document under development. Our submission dwelt on the need for students to have considerably more control over their learning, and it provided substantial evidence that self-directed, democratic learning environments are critical for student wellbeing and a healthy nation. The final version of the UNESCO document and my team’s response to it are found here:
UNESCO: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707?fbclid=IwAR0JQFXESQv4SI3gnLnfcfw96r2qHNykDjpjdZHLda5sTLhIC0ft0Hl4roU
Response: https://youthrightsday.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/response-to-unesco-261021.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1t8OnLWWbY39PzG9p8XTJ5woSxqU_PelYJKu0u0U3sHrN6fg_8NZ0LgI8
Currently, I am focusing my attention on promoting the Youth Rights Day in the Ottawa/Gatineau region and beyond, including providing The 30 Day Countdown Ideas.
Looking Ahead
In the 2018 municipal elections, UCY was very active in helping to inform the public about the candidates running to be school board trustees and to expand the conversation about how schools could better serve young people. The plan is for it to provide the same service with the upcoming 2022 school board elections and any advice you have to offer regarding how to improve upon our past effort is welcome.
A Trustees Matter online event will mark the official start of the 2022 UCY efforts to inform the public about the role of trustees and how municipal elections provide close-to-home opportunities for students to learn about how democracies work. The event will be held at 11:00am on Saturday, January 22nd to commemorate the UNESCO International Day of Education held on the following Monday.