Teen Greens
This was a speech given by the Teen Green founders at the 2009 Green Party AGM
Hi I'm Bethany and I'm Tessa,
We are both young and we're both green but we both felt a bit too young, but definitely green enough, to be involved with the Young Greens.
The Young Greens is open to anyone under the age of 35 and we felt that the age gap was rather intimidating as we were only in our early teens.
The gap to the rest of the party is even greater. A lot of you have spent most of your life in BG … Before Google: Where we find it hard to imagine a world without texting, social networking sites and instant messaging. So, Tessa and I, finding ourselves in this situation, decided to get together, talk to some people, and after that we formed a group. This group is a sub-group of Young Greens, specifically designed for teenagers. And so, Teen Greens was born.
In the last few months we have:
Doubled our membership;
Created an email list for us to communicate with one another; and
Set up a page on bebo, a popular social networking site for teens.
Some of the things we are really passionate about are: Reducing age discrimination, especially within politics; increasing youth participation in the Green party; and, having better and more informative civic education in schools, as this is one of the areas where we feel our education is lacking.
We are hoping to increase our membership and meet many enthusiastic teenagers.
We envision a group of Teen Greens that can support each other and make sure our voice is heard, even though we have no vote. And if any of you are at all interested or know of anyone who could be, then please feel free to talk to either Bethany or myself sometime beofre then end of the conference.
We'd love to meet you...
