The Young Social Innovators Speak Out tour is underway in Kilkenny.
Teams from schools across the region are sharing their details of their campaigns at the Lyrath Convention Centre.
CBS Kilkenny
Alan Hatton is the communications and media officer for Young Social Innovators.
"We have teams from Kilkenny and surrounding counties coming to speak out on issues that they're concerned about, issues that they are affecting change in their local communities and on the world at large.
It takes form the current news stories so consent is very large this year, in years previous we've had LGBT rights - homelessness as well this year is very prevalent.
We have young people advocating for the issues that they care about so we've got homelessness, healthy eating, caring about the elderly their community.
They really speak about the kind of things they're trying to affect some kind of change with."
TY students from Gorey Community School are looking at homelessness, their project is called 'Pimp My Pavement', they told Beat News, "Our performance was about Ronan and his story about he became homeless and how we helped him over the past few months. We also had a few giveaways and stuff over the past few months which raised money for the homeless.
We have a main campaign called knit a square to show you care where we asked the local community to knit squares and they were donated to the homeless like Ronan.
We've been looking at homelessness and how it affects us and it could happen to any of us any day now."
Students from Newtown School in Waterford city examined various issues had various issues such as Laces for Life, destigmatising cancer diagnoses and raising awareness of the Solas Centre and health and fitness.
"I think I learned a lot how to talk to people, network with people and set up a good communications base."
As part of our project we wanted to motivate people to get fit and active so I definitely learned about how to get people to take part and how to motivate others to take part in the community."
"I learned about cancer itself and how not all cancers are bad and that most of them can be preventable and once you get a diagnosis you dont need to be scared and the Solas Centre will be there for you."
"I learned that 4 in 10 cancers are preventable just by the way you live and I think that's unreal."
Teams are allocated to the specific regional Speak Out events around November each year.
For more info on how to get involved go to http://www.youngsocialinnovators.ie
