Celebrating World Youth Skills Day 2022
15th July 2022
What is WYSD 2022?
In 2014 the United Nations General Assembly declared the 15th of July as World Youth Skills Day (WYSD) to celebrate the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment of decent work and entrepreneurship. Since then the day has provided a unique opportunity for dialogue between young people, technical and vocational education and training institutions, firms, employers' and workers' organisations, policy makers and development partners.
While we understand the United Nations General Assembly mission is focussed on employment and entrepreneurship, we believe equipping young people with human centric life skills that facilitate change in everyday actions, in designing an inclusive future is more urgent.
We don't look at design as a silo or just for people who call themselves (or want to be) designers. Design is everywhere and we see it as everyone’s responsibility; from systems and structures that exist by design, to products, the built environment, our homes, to the clothes we wear, shopping areas, skate parks, leisure centres, the list goes on. Therefore we need design skills to run deeper, for designers to connect with humanity and for inclusive design and thinking to flourish to impact cultural change.
Supporting youth culture is part of our mission at Born Equal Consults and influencing young people to take action for cultural change is essential. With that in mind, we decided to build a co-creative impactful workshop and lecture to bring Inclusive & universal design into education. It’s our view that 'human futures are dependent upon inclusion succeeding' and we wanted to create something that introduced youths to further education on the Disabled community through lived experience case studies and exercises that evolved their thinking and changed their perspective.
3 images set together: The first is of Deborah, a white woman giving a lecture to a room of university students taken from behind her. The second is of Deborah & Emma (also a white woman) standing in front of a desk & a computer. There is a large screen behind them showing an illustration of an adaptive shoe drawn by one of the students. The third is of Sulaiman, a wholeheartedly Disabled AF British South Asian Man lying on his side looking into the camera. He is wearing a sequinned top and the shot has been taken of him dialling into the workshop virtually via zoom.
We run this session regularly now and we highlight the importance of language, abelsim, bias and performative action that only damage rather than serve progress. Designing for Disability and the power of designing 'with' not 'for' Disabled people really supports the shift in perspective. For those attending, being in a co-creative learning space with Disabled visiting lecturers Deborah Campbell (Co Founder of Born Equal Consults) and Sulaiman Khan (Chief Purpose Office of ThisAbility Ltd) is both progressive and impactful.
So far our work has influenced more than 10 students to create Inclusion and Disability focused final MA projects.
Working with the next generation of design students
Amol is pictured in front of a city skyline wearing an orange t shirt and sunglasses. He has brown skin, a dark beard with dark hair and he is smiling.
Amol - MA Design Management, University of Southampton
“Being a designer and an engineer, I've been trained over the years to acquire various crafts such as technical, creative and managerial, however, I never truly understood the importance and meaning of inclusivity and universal design in the design processes. The lectures and workshops by Born Equal Consults were an eye-opening experience for me. I realised as a designer when we design any product or service, we tend to exclude a lot of people from our design consideration such as Disabled people , old people, mothers with babies, or people who are culturally different. Any product or service is not complete and satisfactory until it is designed to be universally accepted by all range of people. Since then, I have started seeing things differently I now appreciate small details which may not be useful for me but might help someone. I've now started thinking in terms of how even the simplest things can use the principle of universal design and be as inclusive as possible. In short, interacting with Deborah and the excellent team of Born Equal Consults was a life-changing experience for me.”
What we are offering
To mark World Youth Skills Day 2022, we are offering young people aged between 16-20, who are not able to access our work through university, a space to partake in one of our Inclusive Design workshops to learn human centric life skills that will support us all in innovating toward everyday inclusion. Our workshops are 1 hour long and delivered online. Our booking system will request a donation of £5 per person, please get in touch for complimentary access if funds are not available.
Date: TBC - please email info@bornequalconsults.com to register your interest.
Cultural change is driven by a culmination of people changing attitudes and perspectives. Our collective aim at Born Equal Consults and ThisAbility Ltd is to influence youth and culture to reach a tipping point in relation to Disability inclusion and liberation, working in interdependence, using lived experience rooted in human truths.
