The Urban Nature Project (UNP) Youth Advisory Panel (YAP) provides an opportunity for young people in the UK to use their ideas, voices, personal experiences, imagination and creativity to generate social change. The panel members will primarily be asked to advise on the NHM’s approach to storytelling and communicating with diverse young people nationally, especially through digital media. The first iteration of the YAP took place in 2020 and brought together 12 young people from urban communities to discuss the inequality of access to nature for diverse groups of people.
The success of the first iteration inspired further interest in reaching wider communities to share social and cultural contexts of environmental and biodiversity stories. The upcoming YAP 2.0 aims to achieve this goal by focusing on gaining young people’s insight and sharing lived experiences through digital storytelling.
In collaboration with this year’s 12 participating young people, the YAP 2.0 hopes to reach a wider audience by leveraging the NHM’s social media platforms (Instagram, twitter and the launch of a new TikTok account!). These social media accounts will serve as a platform for the participants to influence other young people in the UK and encourage social change.
Panellists will be invited to attend and engage in a series of 12 bi-weekly workshops from February to July of 2022. Each workshop will offer a unique blend of opportunities for panellists to discuss issues related to urban nature they deem important, expand on transferable life-skills related to digital storytelling and career aspirations, gain insight from guest speakers and to create an impact.
By the end of the series of workshops, the participants will be encouraged to use their own voices to create engaging content for the NHMs digital media platforms and impact other young people in the UK.
They are aiming to recruit a diverse group of 12 engaged young people on the panel, who live in urban areas and are between the ages of 18 and 23. Seeing as this year’s focus is on digital storytelling, panellists need to show an interest in understanding and further developing their skills in using social media platforms for social change. However, they do not need to have prior interest in nature or environmental issues, in fact it will be of benefit to the panel if a range of levels of previous engagement with these issues is represented.
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