The Miniature Earth is an updated version of the earth as a village of 100 people…

Last week I took a 15 minute assembly for Year 7 in a Secondary School on the theme of Poverty. This session was only meant as a basic introduction to the theme, so is deliberately lightweight but is designed to get the children thinking about their own personal response to poverty this Christmas.

A challenging video with a good message from World Vision. New approach to thinking about others’ needs this Christmas.

In 2006 BBC Newsround produced a series of incredible films, The Wrong Trainers, about young people living in poverty in the UK. Using the voices of real young people, the films use animation and carton characters to tell their stories visually. The result is something the Aardman’s Creature Comforts. There are five main stories, all of them involving young people talking about their experience. The animations enable the films to deal with very strong and disturbing stories without making an audience of young people too emotionally upset.

The August Youthwork magazine was all about Justice – and asked the question can young people really change the world?  I’ve recently realised that we’re living in a time where changing the world is more possible than ever, that for the first time in history we have the technology, resources and know-how to get rid of extreme poverty, we just need to give our young people opportunities to grasp. So here’s one for you….

I am running what we are calling a ‘world awareness day’ in local primary school where we will look at the third world, poverty and fair trade. I am just thinking through all the practicalities and what to do and was wondering if anyone had done anything like this before?

Really helpful conversation starter from our friends over at Truetube. Would you like to get your young people thinking wider this Christmas season?

WORD ON THE STREET

I missed the fact that it was Homelessness Day on Sunday. However there are a couple things you might find useful…this week is Poverty and Homelessness Action Week, with a great site set up to cater for it with lots of lovely resources (you have to register to download anything, but only takes a minute and is worth it…it not only discusses poverty on a global scale but also brings it closer to home).

Also, the Salvation Army site has some resources which help children and young people explore this issue in schools…I really like their glocal poverty stuff (think global. act local).