Youth Voice in the Senedd

On 8th of March, in the Senedd End Youth Homelessness Cymru hosted the launch of the ‘Roadmap to Ending Youth Homelessness in Wales’. The Roadmap represents a collaborative approach to making youth homelessness in Wales rare, brief and non-recurring. It outlines What We Know about youth homelessness and more importantly – What We Should Do About It in a single accessible document.

The voices of young people have been imperative in the development of the Roadmap and we were privileged to be joined in the Senedd by two brilliant young people who used their voices to advocate for the thousands of young people who end up homeless in Wales each year.

The event was chaired by Frances Beecher (CEO, Llamau) and in addition to young people’s speeches Bill Rowlands (Project Manager, EYHC) introduced the Roadmap, and Dr Pete Mackie and Talog Harries discussed the importance of Upstream Cymru as a youth homelessness prevention measure.

Below, you can read more about the young people’s experiences and hear their speeches:

Dafydd

• Watch Dafydd’s speech here

Attending the event in the Senedd was a great experience for me to hear other peoples’ experience about the issue and their passion to end the issue of youth homelessness in Wales. I was also very happy to hear all the ideas and thoughts that could help to end youth homelessness in Wales and it was great to see that there are people coming up with new thoughts and ideas to help end the issue, I enjoyed meeting everyone and it was an enlightening experience to see changes happening in Wales and at the Senedd.

Ashleigh

• Watch Ashleigh’s speech here

My name is Ashleigh and I recently delivered a speech on ending youth homelessness in the Sennedd. This was a wonderful experience as it opened me up further to the world of politics. The opportunity given to me to deliver such an important message to the Welsh Parliament and more was truly remarkable, as well as my speech there was also a talk on the roadmap to ending youth homelessness and a q&a session conducted by us, I really hope to be invited back soon.

If you would like to find out more about how we can end youth homelessness in Wales, you can access our Roadmap here.