Funky Dragon is Funked

Ignore what the songs tell you. You really can stop the funk.
(Pic : weirdestbandintheworld.com)

Funky Dragon – which, despite its silly name, is the National Youth Assembly of Wales – is about to be funked six ways from Sundays in the assets by the funking Welsh Government.

For the unfamiliar, it's a charitable organisation – independent of the Welsh Government and National Assembly – which is suppose to represent the views and wishes of people aged 25 and under in order to help Wales comply with the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child (UNCRC).

The Grand Council (the equivalent of the Assembly) is currently made up of 66 members (3 from each local authority serving two-year terms), with a management committee made up of 4 professionals and 8 members of the Grand Council. The organisation also has around 12 full-time staff based around Wales.

In Funky Dragon's last annual report, the financial statement (pdf p122) said it received £418,000 in unrestricted funds (Welsh Government grant). According to BBC Wales, it also received some £326,000 in EU funding and another £196,000 from other sources (restricted funds). After expenditure is taken into consideration, Funky Dragon was running at a loss of around £73,000. That's small beans in the grand scheme of things, but not when the Welsh Government are looking at low-hanging fruit to trim.

After being told to apply for Welsh Government finance through the new Children & Families Delivery Grant scheme, Funky Dragon was told to funk off. It'll lose all Welsh Government funding from October, and unless it finds another source of finance it's a goner. That would mean Wales would be one of the few, perhaps only, countries in Europe without a Youth Parliament.

The irony is that Funky Dragon is hosting its AGM at the National Assembly next week, which  increasingly looks likely to be its last.

Third Sector umbrella organisation, Children in Wales, were successful in their grant bid and will take over responsibility for providing a political voice to children and young adults from Funky Dragon.

It's not going to be a Youth Assembly though, and Wales is about to lose something that's likely to be – in the absence of any real enthusiasm amongst youngsters (Devo-wuh? Young attitudes to Welsh devolution) - very hard to replace.

Instead of Funky Dragon's "bottom up" approach where children and young adults are (mostly) in the driving seat, judging by some of the member organisations of Children in Wales, that's about to be replaced with a more typical high-handed, top down, "we know best" Third Sector approach. The precise reasons why Funky Dragon lost its grant bid haven't been publicised as far as I can tell.

Perhaps understandably this has caused concern amongst AMs who have a bad visibility and youth engagement problem as it is.

In the Assembly's Leader of the House debate on Tuesday, Antoinette Sandbach AM (Con, North Wales), Suzy Davies AM (Con, South Wales West), Mark Isherwood AM (Con, North Wales), Eluned Parrott AM (Lib Dem, South Wales Central) and Peter Black AM (Lib Dem, South Wales West) all brought it up, but were given a generic "cuts from Westminister" response - which doesn't count as a proper answer in my book. Simon Thomas AM (Plaid, Mid & West Wales) also submitted a written question which at the time of posting this hasn't been answered.

Funky Dragon's demise doesn't mean the complete loss of youth engagement with the National Assembly. The Assembly Commission already host schools visits, hosts visits related to the Welsh Baccalaureate and runs the Your Assembly initiative. The Assembly's own separate outreach programmes aimed at youngsters are broadly excellent.

Welsh party leaders recently signed a charter to improve engagement with younger
people. However, while the Assembly's own engagement activities are excellent, Funky
Dragon has a measure of independence that will be hard to replicate.
(Pic : National Assembly of Wales Twitter feed)

On Wednesday, Llywydd Rosemary Butler (Lab, Newport West) hosted a - what appears to be - well-attended youth engagement day at the National Assembly. Party leaders signed a Young People's Charter (pdf) where they agreed to commit to encouraging young people to engage with the Assembly's work, listen to them, and communicate in ways which young people understand. It also sets commitments to young people themselves – that they should respect each other's opinions and should have realistic expectations as to what the Assembly can do.

Unless we're already interested in politics, those of us aged 25-35 are probably seen as "lost causes" in terms of political engagement and we're being cast off in a way. This charter is aimed at the post-devolution generation who were either born after the Assembly was established or are too young to remember the time before devolution.

Perhaps there's a good case for the two "rival" youth political engagement schemes to merge under the banner of "Your Assembly" and be run by the Assembly Commission. Doing that would, however, compromise the current independence enjoyed by Funky Dragon.

The Welsh Lib Dems have called for a full-blown National Youth Assembly, with Aled Roberts AM (Lib Dem, North Wales) saying he "was worried that young people could be ignored and side-lined in future decisions affecting them".

Meanwhile, a member of the Funky Dragon Grand Council from Caerphilly, Joel Price, published an open letter to Communities and Tackling Poverty Minister, Jeff Cuthbert (Lab, Caerphilly), explaining how through Funky Dragon a ban on smoking in playgrounds was instituted in his home county. Joel said the independent nature of Funky Dragon had a "profound practical significance" which would "be destroyed if it was to engage in a joint submission with an adult-led organisation ".

Although I'm probably no longer going to count as a "young adult" in a few weeks time, I still count as a "young voter" (broadly meaning under-35s). Youth engagement in politics is one of these broad issues that doesn't have one single solution. I doubt the answers lie in youth councils and student politics, but by young people becoming actively involved and interested in all aspects of "grown-up politics". Until young politicians and political issues relevant to young people are taken seriously though, youth councils and youth parliaments are all youngsters have.

If "we" get the feeling of constantly being talked at, and told what we should or shouldn't consider important, we'll lose interest in politics pretty quickly, subsequently losing the ability to make our voices heard and articulate our arguments when we need to.

That's what people my age have had to endure, having policies foisted on us that we broadly rejected – university tuition fees, for example. Funky Dragon and institutions like the Children's Commissioner have managed to change that slightly, meaning it doesn't have to be the same case for younger generations.

Neutering the only independent voice for young people and by young people, and using them as a ventriloquist's dummy for the adult Third Sector, is incredibly damaging and might undo all the good work that's been done.