Blog
Pilot art-based youth workshop: Children's rights and climate action
Young people from Cork Educate Together Secondary School and Cork City Youth Council co-create beautiful artwork on children’s rights and the climate crisis.
Despite the very rainy weather on March 13th, 25 young people joined the Youth Climate Justice team in the Dr. Dora Allman room at UCC to take part in a pilot art-based workshop on children’s rights and climate action.
Taking place just before Professor Aoife Daly’s Inaugural Lecture, which doubled as the campus-wide project launch event, this workshop was planned with the intention of bringing together some of the most active young citizens of Cork to talk about the causes of climate crisis and what children and young people are doing about it—and it proved to be an empowering and motivating hour spent together. The workshop was co-facilitated by Prof Aoife, Florencia and Emily, along with child/youth participation expert Katie Reid.
Prior to attending the workshop, the young people had received a crash course on human rights and the environment from Prof Aoife Daly, Florencia and Emily at a Cork City Youth Council meeting and then by Prof Aoife Daly during her visit to Cork Educate Together Secondary School earlier this month. Coming with this prior knowledge, including their experience from involvement in environmental groups and climate action activities, the art-based workshop was full of insightful conversations demonstrating the passion these young people have for social justice issues and working towards making the world a better place.
The workshop was centred around a “human rights tree” activity where young people worked in small groups to brainstorm and create a visual representation of the ‘root’ causes of climate change, the actions children and youth are taking to make an impact (the trunk), and the rights from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that connect to the environment (the leaves). After creating their rights trees, one pupil from each group presented on the result of their collaborative artwork (see the Artwork section for these incredible pieces of work!).
Insights from this workshop will be incorporated into future workshops and the five case studies that the Youth Climate Justice team will carry out over the next 5 years.