Shoot Nations 2008
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Advocacy
What is advocacy?
Advocacy is the way of making sure that the issues that are important to you are heard in the arenas or forums where decisions are made. It is all about making your voice heard and influencing decisions on the issues that matter to you.
The most common form of advocacy in the UK is voting for a MP to represent your views in Parliament. However, there are many other forms.
Campaigns, pressure groups, grass root movements and lobbying MPs and businesses are all key aspects of advocacy – it can be done in many different ways and by different people.
Plan’s Youth Advocacy
A key part of Plan’s work is promoting youth voice in policy forums. We believe passionately that good development has to recognise and involve young people.
Plan believes in empowering young people to mobilise and influence policy at all levels is crucial to successful development.
Plan adopts this child-centered approach across all of its work – whether promoting child rights in West Africa, universal access to education in India or stopping child trafficking in the Philippines.
This climate change project will have a several youth advocacy elements.
- Winners will be in with a chance of accompanying the Shoot Nations team to New York to speak about the environment at International Youth Day 2008. The UN is the highest level of international government.
- Plan will take a selection of images from the project to the Conference of the Parties (COP14) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Poland. The pictures will be used as case study material to back up the voice of youth advocates who will be lobbying decision makers.
- There will be a Shoot Nations public exhibition in London in Autumn 2008. As well as being open to the general public, we will invite local politicians, participants and decision makers to attend so they can view young peoples opinions on climate change.
- Selected images from Shoot Nations 2008 will be used for the Global Education Campaign for Climate Change, a massive global education initiative being led by The Energy Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi. The Chairman of TERI, Dr R. K. Pachauri, who is also chair of the IPCC, received the Nobel peace prize in 2007 on behalf of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).