THE first National Youth Assembly I attended was in 2013. I also attended the following year, and then returned in 2018 after a few years away.
At the end of NYA 2018 I was one of 18 delegates elected to be a youth rep. The first couple of times I attended as a delegate I was only just old enough to go and quite shy. We are put into small groups during the Assembly and I remember my small group leader asking if I would like to be a youth rep. I immediately came up with several excuses; I was too busy starting university, other people would do it better, it just wasn’t for me. By the time I came to apply this year those excuses had fallen away, and I felt moved to put my name forward.
The 18 NYA youth reps are divided into three working groups each with six members. Each group was to focus on each of the three main topics from NYA. I was part of the end of life issues group. End of life issues is a massive topic. We realised the full extent of this when we started discussing what we hoped to achieve during the year. For example, we liked the idea of running social media campaigns alongside national and international days relating to end of life Issues, such as child bereavement awareness. It was very humbling to discover that one of these awareness campaigns exists for most weeks in the year, highlighting diff erent struggles around end of life. Most of the work we have done centres around allowing conversations about difficult topics. We also thought about the role that the church has to play in facilitating this.