POVERTY: See it, Change it, SYP’s 2015/16 national campaign, focused on challenging poverty in Scotland. Its primary aims were to:
- Raise awareness among young people about child and youth poverty, and their right to an adequate standard of living;
- Combat popular stigma associated with poverty; and
- Challenge elected leaders and key stakeholders to work together to uphold the UK-wide commitment to tackle child poverty by 2020.
The key messages of the campaign centred on recognising poverty in Scotland and working to change it:
- See It – We want our society to have a more complete understanding of the causes of and implications behind child and youth poverty, and to understand that the very existence of child and youth poverty is a violation of child and young people’s rights.
- Change It – We want to challenge the negative stigmas and stereotypes that permeate the general population’s views on poverty, and we want to challenge elected leaders at all levels of government to make tackling child and youth poverty a priority.
We believe it is particularly important that voices of young people are heard, loudly and clearly, on issues that directly relate to them. When launching this campaign, we recognised a gap in evidence of young people’s views on poverty from within the existing research. MSYPs led a research project to address this gap by consulting with over 900 young people around Scotland. The research was then compiled into a report entitled It’s not a choice. Read the full report here: It’s not a choice
