Citizens Now

Thanks to renewed support from the Reconciliation Fund of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Ireland Funds' Heart of the Community grant, we are able to renew our schools programme for 2025/26. We will work with around 30 schools this year from right across Northern Ireland including a new cluster of schools in Ballymena in association with Radius Housing.

This work will be under the theme 'Citizens Now' as core to our Civic Youth Work model is the idea that young people are citizens now, not future citizens or citizens in preparation. We want to ensure that young people are not only listened to but also that they can affect policy change around the issues that are important to them.

As we build up to Council and Northern Ireland Assembly elections in May 2027, we want to ensure greater turnout among young people and greater engagement from politicians, political parties, and political institutions in engaging meaningfully with young people. We hope that given the UK Governments plans to lower the voting age to 16 that this will also be the first time that 16 and 17 year olds get to vote here.

We will also be running a large-scale and high profile event this Spring at Queen's University Belfast to which all our schools will be invited. The 'Local to Global' event will link issues young people are focusing on locally to more global themes and will be run in collaboration with a number of partners. Please stay tuned for updates.