Usingdata

Some members of the 2022 Assembly. Photo: https://cyp-biodiversity.ie/resources/

In October 2022, Ireland held its first Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. Over two weekends, the Assembly brought together 35 randomly selected members aged 7–17 from across Ireland to explore, discuss and create calls to action on how to protect and restore biodiversity in Ireland.

To make sure the Children and Young People’s Assembly was designed in a way that worked for children and young people, the project was created and facilitated by an intergenerational team consisting of a Young Advisory Team and an independent research consortium.

The Young Advisory Team comprised nine children and young people from across Ireland, aged 8-16. The research consortium included experts in children’s participation, deliberative democracy, and biodiversity from Dublin City University, University College Cork, and terre des hommes, an international organisation with a focus on children’s environmental rights.

The Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss was commissioned by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

Children and Young People's Assembly on Biodiversity Loss - About. This blog post from DemocracyNext (March 2026) features background and interviews with some of the organizers and participants (Ireland, and related initiatives in Switzerland)

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Eleanor Roosevelt, from her remarks known as "The Great Question", delivered at the United Nations in New York on March 27, 1958.

This quote was a little hard to track down, but I found this in Kathryn Kish Sklar’s essay in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: "Roosevelt's remarks were extemporaneous and no document of them survives… [She] was speaking at the UN on the occasion of presenting a pamphlet co-authored with Ethel Philips, In Your Hands: a Guide for Community Action (New York: Church Peace Union, 1958).”