Our Rights Our Voices
The Our Rights Our Voices project aims to promote awareness and understanding of how human rights are relevant for older people.
Human rights are universal and belong to everyone. They are about treating people with equality and dignity and are relevant to all of us in our day-to-day lives.
The 3-year Our Rights Our Voices project, funded by Comic Relief, began formally in June 2012 and finished in July 2015. During this time, we worked with 8 older people’s forums across England to:
- raise awareness and understanding of our rights
- find practical ways to use human rights locally to improve older people’s daily lives.
Each of the 8 forums have recruited and trained 10 volunteers to become human rights ambassadors, who have put their knowledge into practice. Some have used human rights to campaign on local issues, like challenging cuts to local transport or changes to local parking arrangements. While others have hosted presentations and conferences to increase older people's understanding of how their rights are relevant to them.
Meet the ambassadors
We hear from ambassadors at older people's forums across the UK.
The following 8 forums were central to the success of the project:
- Carrick Over 50s Forum
- Gateshead Older People’s Assembly
- Leeds Older People’s Forum
- Nottingham Elders’ Forum
- Sheffield Pensioners Action Group
- Stratford-upon-Avon Citizens Action Network
- South East Network for Seniors, including Positively Ageing Forum
- Scarborough Older Lesbian and Gay Action and York LGBT Forum’s Older People’s Group
You can read their inspiring stories about their human rights work in their local communities in the human rights toolkit.
Our Rights Our Voices toolkit
As part the Our Rights Our Voices project, we produced this toolkit. It breaks down and explains human rights legislation and uses up-to-date case studies to show how people have used these rights in reality.