Page 1569 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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celebrate young people’s achievements and contribution to the community. The week focuses on how optimistic, bold and vocal young people are—with a full range of fun and diverse events. Throughout this week young people have been actively taking part in the celebrations.
I launched National Youth Week in the ACT for 2011 last Friday at the Youth Week Expo. It was great to see a broad range of youth and related organisations present at the expo. I acknowledge that Mr Coe and Ms Hunter were there in support of this fantastic week of events and the young people involved in it. This week is driven by young people, but everyone is encouraged to participate, young and old alike.
This year Youth Week celebrates the theme “own it!”, which aims to encourage young people to embrace life, share ideas and to become involved in what young people are passionate about. National Youth Week is a fantastic opportunity for people to showcase their events, exchange ideas and act on issues that affect them.
This year sees a range of innovative activities being run by young people, ranging from workshops, music festivals, competitions and opening and closing celebrations. There are 93 events taking place across the ACT up until Sunday, 10 April. There is still a lot happening and I encourage everyone to have a look at the National Youth Week website to see what is going on in their area.
One of the events this weekend is the National Youth Week festival—a fair with art—which is a festival of youth visual art and live performance. The Canberra Youth Theatre is performing hiJinx—a youth variety spectacular—and the CYT actors ensemble will be running a theatresports showdown. QL2 will stage a studio showing of a work created by Melbourne choreographer, Jodie Farrugia. The performance will be part of QL2’s major season “Identify” in August 2011.
The ACT Writers Centre and the Canberra Contemporary Art Space will host the annual zine fair, which includes zines—which I am told are self-published magazines—artwork, badges, buttons, T-shirts, great designs, as well as cupcakes. That is all happening from 12 this Saturday at Gorman House.
Youth Week is, in the ACT, a partnership between the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services and the Youth Coalition of the ACT. I would like to thank the Youth Coalition of the ACT for putting this fantastic event together. National Youth Week would not be possible without their long-term and deep support for the young people in the territory.
The department provides the Youth Coalition approximately $20,000 to coordinate National Youth Week and another $20,000 is provided by the Australian government for grants to provide activities. This year a total of 10 grants were provided to the ACT community to run events that give young people a chance to celebrate their achievements and to recognise the contribution of young people to our community.
A number of grants were provided directly to ACT schools to fund an event or activity initiated by students in ACT high schools or colleges. The aim of this funding is to give young people the opportunity to organise an event for their school or
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