A Plymouth teenager is on his way to New York this weekend to take advantage of a rare opportunity to champion youth issues and rub shoulders with world leaders.
| I hope to tell governments ‘look, you’re not doing things right, you need to make things better.’ |
Tom Burke, 17, from Efford, has been invited to represent young people at a Special Session of the United Nations.
"It's amazing," said Tom. "There are going to be about forty presidents and prime ministers there, so if I bump into them in the corridor I might say 'Hi', you never know."
It is not so unlikely - the eighteen months Tom has spent preparing for this trip with the United Nations Children's Fund have included phone conversations with people like Nelson Mandela.
He said he is hoping to corner UN General Secretary Kofi Annan 'for a chat', as well as mixing with several hundred other young people from all over the world.
The UN Special Session on Children, which runs from May 8-10, will review progress on children's most basic rights - to life, family, health, education and protection, setting global targets for improvement them over the next decade.
 At 17, Tom Burke is already a seasoned campaigner | |
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Tom, a sixth-former at Eggbuckland Community College, who keeps busy in his spare time with Unicef, Save The Children and Peace Child International, said: "I hope to meet with governments to say to them 'look, you're not doing things right, you need to make things better. You have enough money and time, you just haven't put the effort in.'"
He added: "The Special Session on Children is vital because unfortunately so much is still going wrong for children.
"Globally, a billion people live on less than one dollar a day, which is about 60p. The price of two chocolate bars - that's all they live on. That's not right, and that's not fair, and we should do things to make sure that everybody has an adequate standard of living, access to health care and education."
Tom is just as committed to the rights of children in the UK. And some of the biggest problems, he said, are right here on our doorstep.
"Plymouth is split up into 20 wards, and 16 are on the bottom half of the league for social deprivation and poverty," he said.
"It's getting better, but not enough is being spent on youth work and schools, and not enough is being done to provide children and young people with enough information about their rights."
It was Tom's involvement with Voice of Plymouth Schools, a panel of school pupils in the city, that led him into working for a range of charities.
He said: "If governments were trying really hard to work with people and children's lives, you wouldn't need UNICEF and Save The Children. You wouldn't need charities to mop up what the government can't be bothered to do."
About the team
Tom Burke was interviewed by Ben Wildman and Vicky Palmer, both 12. This article was published in the Plymouth Evening Herald.
For more information about the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children, visit Unicef's Special Session website.
