Participants were welcomed to the venue by Lord Gus Macdonald, current Chairman of Macquarie’s Investment Banking Group in Europe.

Jonny Zander, Director of Kaizen Partnership, ran an interactive workshop where participants were able to reflect on some of the fundamental reasons why they were motivated to form a part of the UpRising cohort and embark on a journey to create positive impact in their communities.

The event was a fantastic kick start to UpRising’s third year in action and we look forward to many more to come.

The event was an exciting tribute to the 2009-2010 cohort of UpRisers – 19-25 year-olds who commit one year to engage in leadership training and hands-on community campaigning to change their communities for the better.  UpRising was founded by the Young Foundation in 2008 to identify, recruit and train a new generation of public leaders.

The ceremony opened by Nicola Wherity, a partner at Clifford Chance, who introduced the ceremony’s keynote speaker, renowned critic and playright, Bonnie Greer OBE. Bonnie captured the spirit of the UpRising Leadership Programme, noting that in these ‘interesting times’, we are lucky to see the promise of a flourishing  future generation of young, inspiring and motivated leaders who meet the challenges of the time directly through engagement, mobilisation and action.

Following Bonnie’s speech, UpRising graduate Eshaan Akbar facilitated a panel discussion. Each panellist reflected on their UpRising community campaigns, which aimed to tackle an area of social need in their community. The panel took questions from the audience ranging from queries about mentoring, learning visits, training sessions and community engagement. 

The panel: Komal Chokshi, Sulaiman Ahmed, Liam Baxter, Josephine Ajayi-Majebi and Farah Mohammoud.

A Community Campaign project report from Liam Baxter of the 2009/10 UpRising Cohort in partnership with Ekky Haque and the Community Service Volunteers charity

With the General Election looming just two days away and the future of both the local borough and the local council in the hands of the residents of Barking, Tuesday 4 May saw the brightest and best of the borough’s youth descend on the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Stadium (no really!), home to the Dagenham & Redbridge Football Team for an evening of topical debate with the constituency’s prospective parliamentary candidates.

Towards the tail end of 2009, a chance meeting on the District Line at Dagenham Heathway brought together Ekky and I and a discussion arose about our ideas for a community campaign project across Barking & Dagenham which focused on the key theme of ‘political engagement’. As residents of the borough, Ekky and I were concerned that the local community were not sufficiently engaged in the political process to vote in the upcoming General and Council elections. We found that we both had a common theme in our ideas of getting a ‘Question Time’ style debate set up which involved an opportunity for an audience made up of residents within Barking & Dagenham to question their prospective MPs and Councillors before Election Day.

Current figures showed that the recent European Elections across the borough saw only a 30% turnout while the last General Election in 2005 saw only 1 out of every 2 eligible voters make the trip to the polling station on Election Day to make their voice heard and their vote count. This was simply not good enough! This political apathy, coupled with the very public rise of the Far Right party the BNP in the local area, made us aware that we needed to work on a campaign which helped to raise the profile of the importance of voting in the Election, but would also educate voters to make sure that they were aware of what they were actually voting for on May 6.

After initial discussions with a number of Council departments including a meeting with the Head of our Democratic Services section we began looking at securing dates and venues for our event. Unfortunately while general progress was initially strong, the gods of political debate and community engagement deserted us when it came to securing panel members from the serving Labour Party. The party’s core election message of ‘tackling the BNP head on both in the community and on the doorstep’ unfortunately took a left somewhere down the road when it should have clearly taken a right and ended up in a horrible car crash with the message of ‘we do not share a platform with the BNP’.

Many changes were made to our event proposal but these changes fell on deaf ears. It seemed as if the ghost of political disaffection would win the way and prove that even the politicians themselves were unwilling to embrace our plan for borough wide political engagement.

A month went by and it seemed that our event would never happen. Then completely by chance an email arrived from Aretousa advising us that a young campaigner named Robert Doughty was working on a project for a charity named Community Service Volunteers (not that kind of Community Service!) called ‘Youth Action – Barking and Dagenham’. The centre piece of his campaign revolved around setting up a political debate in a Question Time style format (notice any similarities with this picture?) which involved local candidates for the Barking seat in the General Election. With the opportunity to get involved in this project one that couldn’t be missed I contacted Robert and arranged a meeting to discuss his plans for the event.

Just two weeks later after numerous phone calls, meetings and emails, the event preparations had begun to bear fruit and a venue and panel were secured. The event would be held on the evening of Tuesday 4 May 2010, just before the General Election day and would involve an audience of 16 to 25 year old school, college and youth group members who were interested in hearing what their potential future member of parliament had to say about the issues in the local community that mattered to them.

Even after some last-minute phone calls the event was forced to take place without either the current sitting MP (Labour’s Margaret Hodge) or Nick Griffin of the BNP. Both the panel members however and the 110 strong audience members were not willing to let this stifle an intriguing two hours of political debate. At a quarter past six in the evening we settled down with the audience to hear young members of the borough question the panel on a variety of issues that mattered to them including knife crime, possible funding cuts for students in Higher Education, policing on the streets of Barking and future plans for the council’s Youth and Sports Centres.

With a panel comprising Simon Marcus of the Conservative Party, Jayne Forbes of the Green Party, Liberal Democrat candidate Dominic Carman, the Christian Party’s George Hargreaves and Frank Maloney of UKIP (and boxing promotion fame) all questions were well debated with regular feedback on the issues raised from our audience members who were keen to scrutinise every answer given by the panelists. The event was marvellously mediated by our host for the evening Mr Tom Kingham who is the current Head of News for the local community radio station TIME 107.5 FM.

Although the event finished at close to 8pm we were still on site after half past 8 as the remaining few audience members used their additional time for 1-2-1 questioning of the panel. We received some extremely positive feedback from audience members leaving the event (whilst also managing to do some covert UpRising 2010/11 scouting!) and the panel also left in high spirits with questions of when the next event would be held.

Although the proof will be in the proverbial pudding on Thursday in terms of seeing if the event has any impact on those who attended coming out to vote, it was wonderful to see a room of largely first-time voters take their opportunity to get involved and engaged in the political process in Barking.

A number of photos of the event were taken and a report is scheduled to be added to the next fortnightly distribution of our borough’s local community newspaper ‘The News’. If you are in the local area, look out for this paper which is free to pick up from next Monday.

Although this campaign idea focused largely on the lead up to the election, we have already had tentative discussions with the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) team about taking this campaign forward and holding a similar event for Councillors across the borough once the newly elected Members are in place following Thursday’s election.

If anybody is interested in working with Ekky and I on future events, please get in touch as we hope to continue this on after UpRising is finished. Most importantly, wherever you are, whatever your political views and whichever borough you represent, make sure that on Thursday 6 May you do your duty for Queen and country and vote in the elections!

We had a great time volunteering at Stepping Stones Farm in Stepney Green on Saturday 24 April. Stepping Stones is a community based (and entirely volunteer run) City Farm and Rural Crafts Centre in the heart of Stepney, in London’s East End. A group effort of clearing out the duck pond and painting the surrounding fencing ensured that UpRising did its bit in beautifying this volunteer led farm!

Thank you to everyone who helped out. To see the pictures from the day click here.

The final UpRising Learning Session of 2009-2010 was “epic,” according to one participant. The 20 April event kicked off with UpRising Time, a Question Time-style panel discussion on the successes and outcomes of the UpRising community campaigns and year long programme experience. A panel of UpRising participants summarised their community action projects, which include campaigns to respond to Islamophobia, to connect young people to education and careers, to establish a youth-run radio station, and more. Panelists then responded to questions from the audience, who took on roles such as community authority figure, Young Foundation trustee, television reporter, and leading intellectual.

Nazia, an UpRising participant, described the evening as “An emotional final session but a great way to end.” She added, “I look forward to embarking on a journey knowing I have everything and everyone from UpRising there to support me.”

In the spirit of UpRising, the second half of the session focused on methods to support social innovation and community action. Louise Pulford, coordinator of the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), introduced participants to the complaint choir — an innovative method of community participation and protest that invites people to sing about their grievances in a choir with their peers.

With the aid of a karaoke machine, UpRisers utilised the complaint choir methodology to turn annoying community problems into chart-topping verses. Featured tunes included a protest of banking shenanigans sung to the Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want it That Way’, a plea for courtesy on the tube to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect,’ a diatribe over transfats and fast food to ‘Silent Night,’ and grumbles over student loan debt to Destiny Child’s ‘Bills, Bills, Bills.’

The fabulous performances wrapped-up UpRising 2009-2010 with a roar, and the session connected UpRisers to the broader field of social innovation, including nearly 1000 entrepreneurs and organizations in the SIX global network who are committed to tackling some of the world’s most difficult social challenges.

At the end of the session, Moneea, an UpRising participant, summed up the spirit of the evening and of the programme: “Don’t just be a spectator, get involved. Once an UpRiser, always an UpRiser.”

To learn more email us at uprising@youngfoundation.org or call us on 020 8709 9029.

 “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”  Nelson Mandela

“Do you mainly make decisions based on logical reasoning?”  “Is it ever okay to lie?”  “To what extent do you refer to your ethical beliefs when making decisions?”

These are a few of the challenging issues posed to UpRisers by Jonny Zander, director of Kaizen Partnership, at our 30 March learning session on ethical leadership. Kaizen are a passionate group of consultants, trainers and youth workers specialising in community action in the areas of regeneration, housing, education and employment. 

Jonny facilitated an energizing workshop on the important and complex topic of ethical leadership. Participants confronted ethical dilemmas and real-life scenarios such as choosing between peaceful campaigning tactics and violent ones, confronting sexual harassment in the workplace, and whether and how to choose an ethical job. Finally, we explored the underlying influences on our actions to begin to unravel questions of how and why we make decisions, and perhaps to push us to be more conscious decision-makers in the future.

On Saturday 27 March 2010, UpRising participants and programme organisers took part in day-long event run by the National Community Tension Team at the Metropolitan Police headquarters in the New Scotland Yard building. The NCTT is a team that represents the police service in some of the most controversial areas of policing, including counter-terrorism operations.

Eleven UpRisers and four organisers participated in ACT now!, an exercise run as part of the government’s Prevent programme. Through a sophisticated video simulation and role play, the UpRising team were put in the shoes of officers responding to a potential terror attack in a fictitious town. Working in teams, participants were asked to make difficult decisions that often weighed individuals’ civil liberties against the public’s need to be protected from a potentially life-threatening attack. Teams discussed methods for gathering intelligence, legal protections, public communication, and a host of issues related to crisis response.

Importantly, the event included a dialogue between UpRising participants and Metropolitan Police officers on the challenges and issues related to counter-terrorism and procedures such as stop and search. Officers responded to specific questions about the Manchester 12, (a group of students arrested and subsequently released without charge in April 2009), as well as their efforts to build trust in local communities.

UpRising participants had the opportunity to witness local democracy in action by sitting in on a cabinet meeting at Newham Town Hall in East Ham, on 11 February 2010. The meeting was chaired by the borough’s Mayor, Sir Robin Wales. Some of the topics discussed at the meeting were the final proposals for the Council’s Budget Framework and Council Tax Levy for 2010/11, CRB checks for elected members, the Dedicated Schools Budget, the Religious Education Agreed Syllabus 2010 and the planning briefs for rebuilding four schools in Newham.