Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Official Report 933KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Laura Hemmati, a former member of the Scottish Interfaith Youth Committee, who has travelled from Brussels to be with us.

Good afternoon, Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament.

I would like to talk to you today about empowerment—the need to empower neighbourhoods, children and young people in Scotland and beyond.

We live in an age of contradictions, in which our neighbours are fast becoming strangers. It is an age in which we are more likely to turn a blind eye and keep to ourselves than to engage with the community around us. The consequences of such trends are graver for the future of our children and young people than for any other part of society, as suspicion and indifference not only fuel the spread of prejudice, but have the most disturbing capacity to extinguish a social conscience within our young people.

Young teenagers, in particular, are all too often written off by their neighbourhoods as problematic and lacking in respect when, in reality, such young people are unrivalled in their

“acute sense of justice, ... eagerness to learn”

and their

“desire to contribute to ... a better world.”

Neighbourhoods must not be left to the paralysis of apathy and anonymity, but must be empowered by their leaders and encouraged to come together in starting their own innovative and sustainable projects for social integration.

Youth and voluntary work, after-school initiatives, youth groups, environmental projects, local sports clubs and Sunday schools are some of the countless activities that create the heartbeat of a community and give young people of all backgrounds ownership over their own development, the power of expression, moral clarity, skills for service and the opportunity to forge lasting friendships.

Young people are ready to make a contribution to the progressive development of their communities, but they need to be afforded the necessary tools and support mechanisms to use their real potential as part of a vital, spiritual learning process that occurs outside formal education, just as those members of the community who take pains to set up activities that engage and motivate our youth must also be acknowledged, valued and supported.

Never has the need to transform how we guide and assist our young people been more urgent than now. Nurturing a new culture of grass-roots youth initiatives at the neighbourhood level is, indeed, the surest way to ensure that future generations of young people will come to realise the benefits of contributing to the betterment of their society and to its unity. It is the surest way to ensure that young people will become facilitators of their own wellbeing and be confident in their ability to bring about change. This is a kind of education with

“the heaviest responsibilities and the most subtle influences”,

for which the entire community is responsible and which it must come together to accomplish.