Looking forward to CSW61
Photo: Stroud News
Over the past few months, a group of twenty students from Stroud High School and Marling sixth forms, including myself, have been preparing to attend the CSW61 in New York and we are all very excited to be representing not only our school but our country at this international event.
We are all really looking forward to giving speeches at the UN and as part of our preparations for this, we have invited all of our friends and family into school to come and listen to us delivering our speeches. We hope that this will allow us to receive some feedback and make any last-minute changes to our speeches to ensure that they are perfect by the time it comes to delivering them at the UN!
In the past few weeks, Rebecca Hunt and I have written the youth statement outlining what we as young people believe the key issues facing women are in society today and we will be presenting this to the British government at the UN. On the 23rd February 2017, five of us were lucky enough to attend the CSW Alliance meeting at the European Parliament UK Offices in London where we were able to discuss some of the issues relating to CSW61 and meet lots of amazing people too.
As a group, we have created our own Facebook and Twitter accounts so that we are able to spread the word about the work that the CSW does and we have found that this has been particularly useful in terms of reaching out to other young people. Over the next few days, we are hoping to create a vlog of the build-up to CSW to post on YouTube to raise awareness of the amazing opportunity that we have been given to attend the conference. We have also arranged to have a group photograph and interview with a journalist from our local newspaper, the Stroud News and Journal, so that everyone in our local community is aware of the work that we are doing.
By attending the CSW61, we hope to gain a greater insight into the issues that women from all over the world face so that we are able to educate others and play a part in achieving gender equality in the future.
Written by Lucy Owen
