Caithness and Sutherland Women’s Aid (CASWA) was granted £3000 thanks to the efforts of a team of YPI students at Golspie Academy. The students’ clean, compelling, and creative video can be found here.

Emma Fraser from the charity shares #WhyYPI is so important in terms of raising awareness and promoting conversations about abuse.

“We were blown away by the animation created by the YPI group and immediately made contact with the school to seek permission from the pupils to use the animation for promotional and engagement purposes for campaigns, on our digital channels, to use in presentations with stakeholders, and raise awareness about what we do.

“The animation completely blew us away and brought our team members who attended the final very close to tears! The team had clearly researched our charity and the work that we do well and created an informative presentation and proposal which ultimately won them first place. This piece of work not only won our charity £3000 but provided us with a great tool we can use in the future.

“We have been extremely fortunate to be involved with YPI on a few occasions over the years alongside various schools in our area. We think very highly of the initiative as it gives pupils the opportunity to become more aware of social issues in their communities and the organisations working to tackle these issues on a local level. Importantly, it gives services like ours opportunities to raise awareness within school communities – this is something that we consider invaluable.

“We always welcome involvement with YPI. We enjoy meeting the pupils to talk with them about the work that we do and we are always impressed with the pupils’ dedication and enthusiasm. Indeed, we wish YPI was something we could have been involved in during our own school years.

“It is very important that young people become better aware and informed of social issues and YPI gives them the opportunity to learn about charitable causes and their purposes in a very accessible way.

“Abuse can be a very stigmatised and difficult subject to talk about, but at CASWA we believe in the importance of shining a spotlight on difficult social issues so they do not remain hidden and further stigmatised. It is extremely important that awareness raising work around abuse is undertaken with young people as they begin to navigate the world of relationships themselves.

“Young people are exposed to a huge variety of sources of information from TV to internet and social media, such sources are not always helpful, informative and sometimes are potentially harmful. It is extremely important for young people to have access to appropriate, accessible, informative information about relationships to help them develop sound understanding of healthy relationships, recognise signs of abusive behaviours, and increase their knowledge and awareness of the local specialised services which work within their communities.”