Gort young people bring justice to one world

YOUNG people in Gort are once again showing their social conscience. This week students at Gort Community School along with local No Name Club members as well as adult volunteers, school staff and the Brazilian community in the area, have joined forces to host an intercultural event celebrating One World Week 2009.
The intercultural event will take place on Friday, the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.
The One World Week intercultural event will feature music, dance, singing, food and artwork as well as traditional Irish and Brazilian food and will take place at Gort Community School.
One World Week is a week of youth-led awareness-raising, education and action during which young people learn about local and global justice issues and take action to bring about change. One World Week is led by the National Youth Council of Ireland and takes place throughout Ireland during the third week in November every year.
This year the theme is Just Us or Justice? and the NYCI has developed a resource for youth services to explore justice with young people. The intercultural event in Gort was initiated following a workshop conducted by the NYCI in Galway on October 13 last. County Galway VEC youth officers met representatives from Gort No Name Club and Gort Community School and there was enthusiastic support for the intercultural project from the first meeting. 
The young people have explored 12 areas in which the developed world and undeveloped world is divided and that shows how the balance of justice is starkly tipped in favour of the developed world.
“Using the medium of sculpture, the students have created three cubes and depicted the theme of Just us or Justice? on them. From eight of the sides of the cubes, hands reach out holding the Millennium Development Goals to illustrate how we may tip the balance in favour of the third world,” a spokesperson for the event stated.
“This project is cross-curricular and includes all ages with students and teachers from woodwork, CSPE, SPHE, language, maths, music and geography all having collaborated in this unique event. This piece of development education has joined the whole school together with members of the community in an awareness-raising event,” she continued.
A group of 30 Brazilian students worked on the project along with a third year CSPE class in the community school.
“The project is community-driven as this is the first time the school has had the opportunity to work with members of the Gort No Name Club, some of whom are students in the school,” the spokesperson explained.
Gort No Name Club has been operating for the last 16 years training young hosts and hostesses to organise events including talks on topics of interest to young people and discos for people aged 15 to18 years. Any profit raised is donated to charities, many of them local.