Anti-Racist Youth Led Summit Launch
On Wednesday evening, the 12th of April 2023, Cork launched its first-ever anti-racist summit in Cork City Hall. The Cork Migrant Centre, Children and Young People Services Committee, and The Traveller Visibility Group (along with 42 other groups across Cork) are the three youth-led organisations that have organised the summit primarily on behalf of young people. They have invited policymakers, politicians, and organisations to participate in a discussion about the negative effects of racism and to contribute to the discussion about how to combat racism in Cork and Ireland.
The main objective of the summit is to bring individuals from all walks of life together to talk about positive change, and this consists of front-line service providers, service users, policymakers, and politicians. The young organisers will not only use the artistic mediums of music, spoken word, and theatre to express their experiences with racism, but they will also conduct group conversations on how to work together to develop anti-racist social change methods.
Photography By Gerard McCarthy
The summit, according to the programme coordinator Dr. Naomi Masheti, is a follow-up to a webinar organised by the CMC’s Youth Initiative Against Racism in 2020 in partnership with CYPSC in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement and George Floyd’s death. Through this webinar, young people were given the opportunity to share their own stories of racism, and their message helped policymakers understand how racism still has an impact on people in Ireland today.
The summit will be hosted on May 26th and it hopes to “spark a conversation to actively work together towards an anti-racist future”.