Politics in Education, a project started by Sussex Students, beat thousands of other community projects to win £1,000 in funding.
The funding comes from the Aviva Community Fund which is open to ‘the general public as well as Aviva customers, employees, insurance brokers or financial advisers’. It provides a “chance to get funding for an important cause in your community”. In order to win the funding, PIE (Politics in Education) was required to be amongst the first 200 projects to reach 1,000 ‘votes’ from the general public. They recently achieved this target and are to be awarded the funding.
The project aims to spread non-partisan political education and information on the voting system, political parties and political involvement i.e. signing petitions. The workshops are aimed at 11-18-year-olds, who are future voters. It is volunteer-led and provides interactive workshops in local schools and youth groups.
The project was started by Beth Munro in April 2017 when she realised the paucity of political education in the school curriculum and became concerned about how disinterested young people were.
Since the beginning of the project, PIE has run workshops with 3 different schools and youth groups and now has over 20 student volunteers. They hope to increase these numbers and run 20 workshops in 2017/18 with 30 student volunteers.
Upon starting PIE, founding member Beth Munro said: “Many young people feel detached from the political system – you can see this in the relatively low turnout among this age group at recent elections”. So far, PIE’s reception has been very positive, particularly by students.
After winning the funding, Ms Munro said: “Thank you so much to everyone who voted. It’s an incredible feeling to know that we have community support and that people think that political education is important. The workshops are free of charge as we want to provide equal access to our programme to all young people, no matter the school budget, which means that our quest for funding continues. However, we are extremely grateful for the support and excited to continue equipping young people them with the skills and knowledge they need to make change happen”.
Picture courtesy of Politics in Education