Founded in 2020, the HistoricScot Youth Forum is a panel of 25 young people from a variety of backgrounds across Scotland. The volunteers are aged between 11-25 years of age.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Youth Forum was able to continue working online and meet with staff from across our organisation. Currently working in a hybrid form, the forum has been on investigating how to involve young people in the heritage sector, and how to make the heritage sector more accessible for young people.
Working in partnership with Young Scot, we use co-design principles to make sure that this panel of young people lead the way at every step of this process.
In June of 2021, the young people produced their first Recommendations and Actions Report.
Read the reportSince September 2021, the HistoricScot Youth Forum has continued working closely with HES to explore how their ideas could be tested out, before finally creating their Youth Action Plan in July 2022.
Over the last months, the young people took part in working groups, meetings, workshops, volunteering, and developed four prototypes to test out their ideas. The result of their work was a report which identified a series of actions aimed at improving youth engagement and accessibility across HES sites and online. They also made recommendations around how to provide more opportunities for young people to be involved in the work of HES.
At its core, the Youth Action Plan aims to help create a heritage sector that is more engaging, accessible, inclusive, diverse, equitable, decolonising and climate aware.
Read the Final Report and Youth Action PlanYou can keep up to date with all the latest from the HistoricScot Youth Forum by following the #HistoricScot hashtag on Twitter.
The work they have been doing has contributed to the strategic priorities of Our Place in Time (Scotland’s historic environment strategy), the objectives of the 2018 Year of Young People and its legacy, our 2019-22 Corporate Plan, and the Scottish Government’s commitment to widening engagement, participation and involvement of individuals and communities, including young people.