Young people mobilise to save their future

Rachel Collier co-founded Young Social Innovators in 2001, an organisation that gets young people across Ireland to set up community based socially oriented projects. Over 30,000 young people have taken part in the programme and this year some 7,000 young people will participate.

Since the start of the economic downturn in 2008, Collier says that student groups have started focusing their energy on themes like poverty and unemployment. She hopes that the programme is an outlet for these kids who are directly impacted by the recession. 

How is the recession impacting young people in Ireland?

All our news coverage has been so depressing for the last two years. All our young people hear is very bad negative information and any good information coming out from banks or politicians they don’t believe anymore, the trust is really broken. It is very hard for young people to think that the reality they are watching on the news is their future. And I think a lot of them are feeling very angry because they don’t have a say in their future anymore. They can see all the money that is being committed into some big black hole to save our banks and they know that is their future and it is their future. You can’t say it isn’t, really. 

A recent government survey says that 65,000 people emigrated from Ireland last year. Are you seeing lots of young people choosing to go abroad to look for work? 

Immigration has definitely gone up, and young people are leaving college and leaving the country and nobody wants to see that happen again, it’s happened before and we thought we were past that…

What other impacts is it having?

They can see it in their schools: classes are getting bigger, teachers not being replaced, special needs programmes are being dropped, they can see all of that happening. It will impact more and disproportionately children who are socio-economically worse off and it will have a detrimental effect on people with special needs.

Do you worry that the government’s recovery plan will have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable social groups?

Yes. It’s already being demonstrated in education; these cuts are having very negative effects. When education could have been invested in, it wasn’t and now it’s really going to suffer. When you cut the spending on education its cutting off your nose to spite your face, because that is the future that is where the energy and ideas are going to come from in a few year’s time. People need to be enabled to make the changes that society needs.

Are you worried as an organisation?

Oh yeah, but everyone is worried. Our funding has been cut for the past two years. We are a very small organisation, we have a huge reach in Ireland, but we are very small at the centre. We have lost at least a third of our budget. We worry about it, of course, but it doesn’t disenable us. It does really make us focus on what we spend our money on. We have had to redirect funding and we have lost staff as well and we have had to downsize our national events, but also, we see it as an opportunity to try and figure out how to grow, but grow in a sustainable way.

Are you hopeful?

These kinds of budget problems, they always forces you to the brink and NGOs are kind of used to it. I’ve been working in the sector for 30 years and there have always been funding problems, so it is nothing new, it is just that now there are more of them. There are no guarantees in the non profit sector and it is a very risky business. Having said that, our programme is hugely popular and young people love it, so we’ll go on, money or no money.