Trustee Blog from BuDS - Cary

Cary is one of the BuDS Trustees, as well as one of the Fair4All Card Co-Ordinators and a member of the Comms team. Here, they talk about how they got involved with BuDS, and how important it is to get young people involved in charity work.

“Over the Summer, I attended the DPO Conference and had some wonderful conversations in the conference chat about how young people can get more involved in the work that charities are doing. As a young person involved in a disability charity as both a project lead and a member of the trustee board, here are my thoughts on the matter.

I want to begin by saying that I haven’t always been this enthusiastic; I wasn’t the model teen activist who knew about all of the issues and got involved with everything. My first introduction to Buckinghamshire Disability Service (BuDS) was in 2014 when my mum joined. And, like any teenager dragged into something largely against their will, I hated it on principle. I knew vaguely that BuDS did good things, but all I ever saw was endless days in the summer months sitting or standing in a field at events, either boiling in the heat or drowning in the rain. Don’t get me wrong, I knew we did good work at the events, making them accessible for disabled people, and I did, albeit reluctantly, enjoy some parts of what we did. But, at the end of the day, it was perhaps not the best way to engage a disgruntled teenager in all of the valuable things that BuDS and other disability charities do.

So, off I went to university, glad to finally escape the obligation of attending the events. In the end, that attempt at university didn’t work out so well for me, so I withdrew from the course just days before the first UK lockdown. A house had already been organised, so I still lived with university friends during the first year of Covid but instead of studying, I was trying to get a job.

In July or August 2020, one of my friends messaged me about an idea from the BuDS trustee board. A card that would help disabled people prove that they were legally entitled to exemptions from the Covid-19 regulations. I didn’t have much else to do and it sounded like a good idea and a fun way to kill some time while building up useful skills. And so began the Fair4All Card. We spent hours in meetings together building the scheme from scratch. We had been told the basic premise and we then had to develop it into a fully functioning project that the trustees would accept, and then we got to make it happen.

Fast forward nearly two years and the Fair4All Card is still going strong, and it has expanded far beyond our original plans. I’m also part of lots of other teams including Comms and Fair4All Education. And, most importantly, I am also now on the trustee board.

So, how did I go from being a teenager who disliked the charity on principle, to being a trustee of the charity in my early twenties? It’s quite simple really; I was given an opportunity. An opportunity that interested me and gave me the chance to actually do something. I saw that I was making positive change with the Fair4All Card and I wanted to keep going. It didn’t happen all at once, but I was given the chance and the time to develop skills and that helped me realise that I could do something about a fraction of the injustice in the world.

We live at a time where we have incredibly easy access to a lot of information about things that are happening. Between Covid, the current cost of living crisis, recent reproductive rights issues, the war in Ukraine, climate change, continued racism, homophobia, transphobia and so much more, there is an almost impossible amount begging for our attention every second of every day. So much, in fact, that it is very difficult to not, at times, feel overwhelmed and more than a little bit helpless.

According to?research by Barnardo’s in 2019, 35% of young people said they felt negative about their future, mainly talking about concerns for housing, careers, and finances. 69% of young people believed they would have worse happiness or poorer mental health than their parents. 54% were worried about climate change with 42% saying that older generations don’t seem to understand or are interested in changing things. And that research was from 2019. Pre-Covid. Pre-current cost of living crisis. Pre-a lot of collective traumatic events. I dread to think what those statistics are now.

All of this paints an all-too familiar picture of my generation being acutely aware of the issues facing us both now, and in the future, but overwhelmingly not knowing how to change it with what we can do by ourselves right now. And that is reflected in what I see around me in my own life on a day-to-day basis.

Is it any wonder then, that in a generation that has constant access to information, in a world that is facing one issue overlapping the next, that we feel helpless? That we feel angry? That at times we don’t even know where to begin?

But a generation that often feels helpless to the point of deep anger is a generation that has the capability to create massive change if we are only given the chance.

I call for all charities, including disability charities, to look at what you do, and look at who is doing it. I went from being an angry, disengaged teenager to an angry and engaged young adult because someone gave me a chance to get involved in something that mattered. It gave me a focus and a way to create some sort of tangible change in my community. I know I can’t solve everything, but because of my involvement with BuDS, maybe one day I can get somewhere that helps me make an even bigger change for the next generation of young angry, scared teenagers.

Please make spaces for young people in what you do. Whether that’s making youth-led projects, mentoring young people, including young people in your trustee boards, or just showing young people that there is something they can do even if it is only for one week in one summer holiday.

Just please give us a chance to do something. We can’t fight the systems that are against us if the systems that exist to help don’t include us. We are here, and we are angry, and we want things to change. But we are also so tired, and we need you to listen to us and give us an opportunity because we can’t do things alone.”

Disclaimer: this is a blog post, written by one of our members. The views expressed within are entirely their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of BuDS or its other members.