British-Ghanaian Isaac Cudjoe leads in politics in his town, Ipswich in the United Kingdom.
The 18-year-old says he wants to inspire the next generation and thus after serving as the town’s Youth Member of Parliament, he set up the Youth Council in Ipswich.
‘I just want to inspire other young people to not be afraid to have their voices heard and not be afraid to go out there and make their mark.
Politics to me, it means an array of different things. It gives people the ability to change things for the better. It enables people to be brought together from all different forms of communities and also enables people that have power within society to bring people that are less fortunate to try and give us all an equal footing.’
Issues such as knife crime are killing young people in the UK, especially young black men.
Isaac raised the issue in a youth debate in the House of Commons, the UK’s parliament. He lobbied other influential politicians and speakers on his concerns to get something done about it.
‘Through lobbying key decision makers, I visited key councillors, MPs, and just visited different youth groups. So I could gather as many different voices as possible.
I’ve been doing this because I think it’s important to be representative of the people that are within our communities because I feel as a young black person growing up, I didn’t really have many black young people that were within politics.’
He believes that anything can be done to save a community and make it better; ‘as long as we put our minds to it.’
