Be The Change

‘Be the change you want to see in the world’  

There is always a lot of bad press around young people. The media likes to give a lot of attention to the small percentage of anti-social youths who like to cause trouble and break the law. For some reason they are less likely to run stories about young people working to make a change in their community.

 

I often found myself getting angry about the way young people were portrayed on TV and in the news but I rarely did anything about it. I assumed that being only one person there was nothing I could do to change the culture of the way the news was reported. Then I stumbled upon this quite famous quote from Mahatma Gandhi.  

 

Gandhi was only one man but he brought about amazing change in a country that was corrupt and unfair. He believed in changing things by modelling the change that you wanted to appear. 

 

This has inspired me to want to share more good things that young people are doing in this world so that every time a news report about another stabbing involving a young person, or an incident involving so called ‘feral children’, I can email them and say ‘but look at what some young people in that community are doing. Bringing hope, not fear’.

 

There are two challenges this week. The first is to send us all your stories of how you are reaching your local community. The second is for you to make your local media aware of the positive things that young people in your area are doing. You could even put on a special event to display what your group are up to.

 

If we want to see change in our communities, it must first start with us.