Young women
Delegates at CSW60 (2016)
YWA Advance is our latest programme supporting young feminist activists to gain the knowledge, skills and capacity to call for their rights, using the Sustainable Development Goals as a tool.

We support successful candidates every step of the way, from better understanding their rights and concrete ways to call for them, to sharing their knowledge at their own events, and sharing their change-making achievements via blog posts and social media.

The 2016 cycle culminated with celebration events in the Houses of Parliament on the 30th November, giving young women the chance to share their newfound learning, achievements and confidence with parliamentarians and experts.

You can read our official report right here! Complete with quotes from our sixth form age participants’ actual speeches in parliament and extracts from their blog posts and events – read the report in full for more on what matters to them, as well as ways to support young women striving for gender equality in their daily lives.

Links to delegates’ full speeches are included too.

The programme in numbers:

  • 6 delegates – open to all self-identifying UK women aged 16-25

    2+ legal frameworks for women’s human rights, and concrete ways to use them in everyday life inc Human Rights Act and (Global) Sustainable Development Goals, the so-called “women’s bill of human rights” (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women and girls; CEDAW), and “blueprint for equality” (Beijing Platform for Action)

  • 11 individual delegate-run events

  • 9 individual blog posts

  • ~8 hours of training calls* per participant

  • 1 bespoke activist’s toolkit

  • 6 speeches; 1 day of celebration, on 30th November in 2016. Experts including our YWA delegates, Baroness Verma, Roberta Blackman Woods MP, Carolina Gottardo, Eilidh Whiteford MP and Jenny Vaughan joined us to discuss the SDGs, Violence Against Women and Girls and the role of youth in change. You can read our initial thoughts and 8 simple actions we were inspired to take if you’d like to be too!

Here’s what delegates said:

“Having some idea beforehand about the intersectionality of race and gender prevented me from dismissing an incident as ‘normal’ or something that women of colour are meant to accept.
Young people have the passion, the interest and the capability to affect real change. The catalyst needed now is comprehensive education in schools.”
I have seen how passionately my peers will support an end to harmful misogynistic practices when they understand them
“A survey I did of a group of students at my school highlighted that whilst 77% of respondents knew of someone who had experienced domestic violence, nearly half of them did not know where to get help if they were victims themselves.

And Wrote:

This programme is specifically open to young women, so you’re a self-identifying woman aged 16-25 in the UK and share our vision for equality for all, stay tuned! We are currently not accepting applications for YWA Advance, but we hope to run the programme again in the future, so stay in touch here, via email and on Twitter to be the first to know next time we open.

We are very grateful to ROSA and their Voices from the Frontline project which has supported YWA Advance to become a reality,