Meet the UKYP members putting ideas into action.
Young are the future
Melody Hossaini, 17
Without young women like Melody Hossaini, the UK Youth Parliament might never have got off the ground.
She got involved with it right at the start because she believed in the importance of youth participation. She helped put together a petition for a young people's parliament, and as the person who collected the most names, presented it at 10 Downing Street.
She says: "Young people are the future and need to be given opportunities so they can prepare themselves for when their time comes."
"If we don't get much done for this generation, we won't have laid the foundations for the next."
Melody feels that the UKYP has come a long way since it started and its members are trying harder, becoming more determined to make the UKYP succeed.
She believes the key issues for young people are transport and education.
And she is convinced that young people need to be much more involved in the whole process of policy and decision making. Melody, from the West Midlands, has met her local Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack, and other MP's like Lembit Opik, a Liberal Democrat and UKYP Trustee.
She doesn't believe that MYPs need to hold particular party political views. She says: "People in power should work with young people."
"Rather than being against us, they should work with us to make decisions that affect us."
She is a Millennium Volunteer - a government funded programme for young people volunteering their time to help others - and has been featured in her local paper many times, so her constituents know who she is.
She produces press releases to keep the papers up to date on youth issues, and has visited her local school and held assemblies about youth representation.
Melody wants young people in Staffordshire to know she can give them a voice, just like their Westminster MP.
It kept me out of jail
Karim Ibrahim, 17
Karim Ibrahim has come a long way. Two years ago, he was close to being excluded from school, which he didn't think was giving him a suitable education. Life on an estate in the London borough of Westminster seemed to be taking him nowhere.
Then he got involved with the UK Youth Parliament. It has changed hi life and now he often puts in 25 to 30 hours a week for young people in his community.
Aged 17, he is opinionated and passionate about accepting and involving young people from all backgrounds and ethnic groups.
"I'm a bit different to the people here," he said at the UKYP last week, "but everyone here is from different walks of life and we are all here for one reason: bringing people together. I'm someone who puts ideas into action.
"I've kind of grown up through the Youth Parliament, so I started off as a standard MYP, and grew up to be chair of my local region, and then came through to the Procedures group (the UKYPs equivalent of a cabinet) and became one of the chairs of Procedures."
As such, Karim was part of the group that set the agenda for the second National Sitting - he also organised all the discos.
In his first year he recruited a team of three youth advisors to help him represent the young people in his constituency. He organised a training programme for them, and raised the money to pay for it. His team has grown to 18.
This year, Karim was successfully re-elected for a second term as MYP, and was voted Westminster Young Person of the year - he gave his £500 charity prize to a project working with disabled young people.
He also helped to set up an environmental project, Ecoloday, which encourages young people to connect with the environment.
He helped raise £5000 to make their own video to raise the profile of the group. Karim appears in the film, and explains why the organisation means so much to him. "If it hadn't been for the UKYP," he says, "I'd probably be in prison, or even dead."
About the teamThis story was produced by Lindsay Marchant, 18, Jonathan Hudson, 15, and Laura Smith, 14. It was published in the Daily Mirror as part of a special Children's Express pull-out on the UK Youth Parliament.
