With the Child Friendly Leeds initiative high on the top of the list of priorities for Leeds City Council, we have joined other cities across Europe to lobby for the creation of a new working group on children at the heart of EUROCITIES network. Our efforts have paid off and Leeds was announced as the chair of the new working group at a network meeting in Warsaw last month.
Councillor Fiona Venner, the Executive Member for Children and Families, was representing Leeds in Warsaw and joined several other politicians from across Europe in making pledges to create a more “Social Europe”. The Leeds pledge was focused on our work around Child Friendly Leeds:
“We pledge to work with our local elected members, our child friendly ambassadors, our schools and other interested partners to do all we can to alleviate the damaging effects of poverty and ensure that no child in Leeds misses out on the wide variety of opportunities – educational, cultural and recreational – that our great city has to offer to its children.”
The new Children’s working group will allow Leeds to work alongside cities such as Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Dortmund and Cologne in Germany, Stockholm and Gothenburg in Stockholm and Brno in the Czech Republic in developing policies which put children first. We will be looking at how to combat child poverty, how to construct child friendly cities and promote the voice and influence of children and young people.