Former J8 team member Ellen tells how she took part in ‘Door-stepping the media’, a six-day residential organised by You, Me and the Climate (YOMAC) to help young people to prepare and organise summer projects on climate change in their areas.

YOMAC is a youth-led project aimed at mobilising young people to take action on climate change within their communities.

“For me, ‘Door-stepping the media’ was a steep learning curve in my knowledge of climate change, of the media and in organising events.

We took part in lots of workshops related to climate change and also went to different media outlets such as the BBC, a design company, an advertising agency, ITV, DEFRA, museums and Friends of the Earth.

These different outlets told us about how they tried to be green as a company and also how they presented climate change to their audience, as well as their role in the media. Personally I found these really interesting and useful and I learnt quite a lot about the media that I didn’t know before.

As part of ‘Door-stepping the media’, YOMAC needed to organise a media event on the Tuesday of our stay. We had to organise this and the idea was to build a huge sand sculpture of the UK in Gabriel’s Wharf, London’s artificial beach on the Thames.

To attract more attention we decided to have a ’50s-themed beach party as well. To accomplish this I was part of the costume and props team and spent a lot of time designing costumes and finding out where to get props.

We also did a lot of sewing and the responsibility I had helped me learn more about organising an event, which I will need for the summer, when I will have to organise an event relating to climate change in my area.

Through the media event on the final day we managed to reach a lot of people handing out over a thousand leaflets to people and talking to members of the public from all backgrounds about their opinions on climate change and why we care so much.

At the end of the day we did not attract as much media attention as we hoped, but talking to people helped us to feel like we were making a difference - even a small drop in the ocean is still worthwhile.

I feel that we can’t really stop climate change as we can’t make people change their behaviour or stop creating carbon dioxide, but it is better to try and feel like we did all we could than to sit back and let it happen.

We wanted to show people that some young people really do care about this very real problem and we did and are doing just that.”

Take action - ask your local MP to make the Climate Change Bill count (this link takes you to the main UNICEF website).

Find out more about the ‘Turning the Tide’ event on the You, Me and the Climate website.

In the news: UNICEF UK release Climate Change report about the serious impact of climate change on children and their rights.