Indagine sul Mercato degli Alloggi in Locazione nel Comune di Bologna [Inquiry on Housing in Bologna’s Municipality], Bologna: Instituto Carlo Cattaneo. Available from: www.cattaneo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Indagine-sul-mercato-degli-alloggi-in-locazione-Bo.pdf
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It’s okay to think freely: how participation changed us
Christina McMellon, Katherine Dempsie and Myada Eltiraifi
Introduction
While there is a significant literature exploring the theory and practice of young people’s participation, there is less written about young people’s experiences of taking part in participation activities. This chapter, co-written by two young people who volunteer with a project called Young Edinburgh Action (YEA) and a member of staff who used to work with YEA, provides a rich exploration of such experiences. The chapter comprises a ‘story’ written by each individual author detailing their time with the project. The stories do not have a common structure but rather reflect the aspects of the individual’s experiences that they consider to be the most important and meaningful.1 After the three stories there is a discussion section that was generated from a group discussion between the three authors about the commonalities and differences between the three stories (see also Chapter 13 in this book).
Box 3.1 Young Edinburgh Action
Young Edinburgh Action (YEA) was established in 2013 as an innovative approach to implementing the city’s participation strategy.
Action research groups are at the heart of YEA’s approach and enable a core group of young people to explore a topic and research the views of other young people in Edinburgh. Three topics for action research groups are chosen by young people each year.
A ‘Conversation for Action’ is convened at the end of each action research process and is an important interface where young people and senior decision makers invited by the young people come together to discuss the topic and develop an action plan. Young people present their learning, ideas and recommendations in order to facilitate meaningful dialogue between young people and relevant policy makers and senior officers.
More information about YEA is available from: https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/16875/CRFR%20briefing%2085.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Myada’s story
I remember not really wanting to join YEA; my mum just wanted to get me out of the house and she said, “Oh there’s this thing at the council, I’ve signed you up for it, you have to go.” I don’t remember much about the event except there was food there and I enjoyed it! I remember giving them my phone number and then very quickly I was going to up to three different meetings every week.
Everyone in the groups was from different backgrounds and everyone had a different story and I really liked that. I liked how crazy and fun it was. We’d be doing stupid stuff all the time but it was okay to be stupid. I didn’t like high school and I didn’t have a lot of friends there, so it was nice to be in an environment where people didn’t know me already and I could just be myself and people liked me for me. I could talk about things that were important to me with people my own age and no fear of getting in trouble or being judged like at school or at home.
I didn’t feel that strongly about politics when I joined YEA, but through going to the meetings I started thinking, “Actually, yeah, 16-year-olds should have the vote.” I really started to feel passionate about the subject, and then that’s what sparked my interest in politics and stuff.
The Conversation for Action for the Votes at 16 Action Research Group was in one of the rooms in the city chambers. I remember showing the video that we’d made and then I remember feeling kind of stupid about the video and thinking, “They won’t understand our inside jokes and maybe they won’t take us seriously.” But then I remember that we talked and got our points across and then I remember leaving and thinking like, “Yes! We just did that, that was really cool.” But it was frustrating because we said, “What are you guys going to do about this?” and they said, “We’ll get back to you about that ’cos we need to speak to our superiors and we need to have another meeting to talk about it” but nothing happened.
At the time I was very curious about the world; I was questioning all these things and the more I learned about the world and the more I became friends with these people and learned about their experiences and things they’d done I was like, “Oh I wanna do that”, but then I’d realise that, “Actually no I can’t do that because of my parents or because this goes against my religion or this goes against my culture.” My parents didn’t like that I was questioning our community and how traditional it is. It annoyed me because I wasn’t being influenced, I was like, “I’m making my own decisions, I’m learning these things and then I’m choosing, do I believe this or do I not, do I agree or not.” There were all sorts of little things. For example, I remember not being able to say the word sex and beginning to think, “Why am I not able to say that word?” and then later thinking, “Me not being able to say that word is giving power to the word.” I tried to explain that to my parents but they just didn’t get it. And also I would go to events and be startled by what people looked like, so like girls with really short hair or guys with long hair or girls that identified as guys, just all that sort of thing that I was not used to, and the more I met new people the more I learned to accept that it was okay and it was normal. And then I was so proud of everything we were doing. I was especially proud of Alex and Charlie.2 I couldn’t wait to be able to say, “I’m a published author.” I thought it was so cool that we’d done that and how much hard work we’d put into it and that we were helping to educate little kids.
The most important thing I’ve learned from all the different groups is that it’s okay to think freely, that it’s okay to have an opinion and that, even if people don’t like your opinion, it’s still okay and you shouldn’t change that opinion just because you are afraid of what other people might think. YEA also taught me that I can be friends with adults. In my culture you can’t be friends with them because there’s a barrier of respect that you have to have for them. YEA taught me that you can respect someone and also be friends with them. None of the staff talked to us as if we were children or too stupid to understand complex things.
When I was 16 there was so much of a clash between the world that I was living in and the world my parents wanted me to live in. It got to a point where whenever I wanted to do something that I knew they wouldn’t like I was too scared to talk to them about it, so I would lie and I would say that I was doing something that I wasn’t just so that I could be with my friends and do normal teenager-like things. And then the more I lied, the more difficult the relationship got.
I left home and I was homeless for four months, just couch surfing, moving from house to house with my little suitcase. I finally got a place in a hostel and I lived there for nine months and it was difficult. That was the point I was quite crazy and impulsive, and I didn’t care about my education at all. I stopped going to school, I stopped really caring about
