11th June 2008 Rebecca Harries, Chris Gibbons and Ben Sawyers of Funky Dragon delivered the Our Rights Our Story report to the United Nations committee on the Rights of the Child. The report has been two years in the making and was written by young people with help from the staff at Funky Dragon.
Geneva was awash with football supporters of all nations which made a colourful backdrop to the feedback from the largest children’s rights report ever written in Wales. The feedback takes place every five years and is the culmination of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child monitoring process.
The committee sat in two hearings; a formal and an informal one both of which turned out to be surprisingly formal. Rebecca and Ben fed back first, detailing the results of our survey with regard to education, health, participation and information.
Chris fed back during the informal session, over lunch along with representatives from England. The hearing was much more mixed than anticipated with regard to the number of organisations which were present which left less time for young people to feed back than was hoped.
Rebecca said “I thought it was going to be more young people oriented instead of the workers. But it was cool that the workers were there as well because you got to see how much work they had put into their reports”.
For Chris it has been more than just a report “being involved from the beginning has changed me as a person”
Ben was even more dramatic and talked about the whole process when he said that “it’s a lot of work but it is worth it” and about the hearing he had this to say, “we’ve done all the work, this is crunch time, get in there and do your best”.
The report is the culmination of two years of hard work for some of the young people on the steering group and they are very proud of it. This is a major achievement by any standards made even more impressive when you consider that the young people were learning the process as they went along.
Many lessons have been learned and the young people will be able to pass on their knowledge to those who write the next report. The most important thing is that Funky Dragon has been able to put a set of recommendations to the Welsh Assembly Government which they have responded to and are acting upon. These recommendations were written by young people based on reliable evidence about their peers from all across Wales. The views of Welsh young people are now being heard at the highest levels thanks to our trip to Geneva and all of the hard work put in by the steering group over the last two years.