By Marianne B, Year 13

On Thursday 20th November, our Amnesty Youth Group travelled to Birmingham art centre for the annual Amnesty Youth Conference. This year the conference was based around  how young people are the future, and should use their voice to stand up for what they believe in. As soon as we arrived, we were greeted by the Amnesty volunteers who brought us to a conference room where the itinerary of the day was presented. In this session, the volunteers spoke about their journey to work at amnesty and their overall experiences. Moreover, two girls at one of the schools across the UK which were in attendance, presented what their Amnesty Youth Group had done at their school and their plans to raise more awareness. This was extremely interesting as it allowed us to gather ideas for our own Youth Group. 

Then, the schools attending broke out into groups, heading into different Amnesty related workshops. The first of these involved using our voices through writing poetry, as part of Amnesty’s ‘Words that Burn’ initiative. As a group, we found this to be especially empowering, each of our ideas coming together to create a piece of poetry representative of our own NHEHS Amnesty club. Hearing the poems from other schools was also inspirational and thought provoking, leaving us with new ideas and discussion points for back at school. Our next workshop involved working more collaboratively with the other schools present, going around the event space and asking students what issues they felt most strongly on. This was part of Amnesty’s ‘Use Your Voice’ campaign, the aim being to create a youth manifesto, led by young people in the UK to direct change.

Overall, we found our experience both enriching and thought provoking, leaving us feeling collectively more empowered, and with new ideas for how we can help make change using our voices as part of the NHEHS Amnesty youth group.