‘Shout Out UK aims to safeguard and enhance democracy by running political literacy and media literacy programmes in secondary schools and colleges, as well as digital engagement initiatives to make sure that everybody understands how they can engage with their democracy,’ explains Bergamini. ‘Political literacy basically means understanding the bare bone basics of how your democracy functions to then engage with it.’
Bergamini and his colleagues also teach media literacy, ‘which means how to critically analyse the information you receive that shapes your voting decisions. This can be social media, tv, radio, podcasts, etc.’
Shout Out UK was started by Bergamini in 2015 when he was finishing his degree. ‘The catalyst was frustration with the way media were reporting on young people. We were referred to as feral, and as a generation we were being hounded for not engaging with a system that frankly never taught us how to engage with it in the first place. And I thought that to be deeply unfair.’
To tackle this, Shout Out UK works directly with young people in schools and also trains teachers to deliver political and media literacy materials themselves. ‘The courses can last up to six weeks or they can be on-off interventions, depending on the school setting.’ It also runs campaigns, which are digital and offline initiatives run with local government partners. ‘We run the Greater London Authorities Voter Registration Week, which happens every September. It focuses on voter registration and democratic engagement and awareness,’ says Bergamini.
As well as encouraging democratic engagement, Shout Out UK tackles violent extremism through media literacy initiatives. ‘We work with the Home Office’s prevent agenda to counter specifically far right narratives, white nationalism, supremacy and online misogyny, which there is no shortage of at the moment.’ Bergamini uses a method called pre-bunking. ‘Prevention is cheaper and easier than cure. We deliver a curriculum in school-wide interventions to cement critical thinking skills, emotional resilience and the ability to catch this content before this content meets you.’
Ten years after its foundation, Shout Out UK has delivered courses to over a thousand schools and worked with 60,000 young people across the nation. Bergamini is determined that success will not breed complacency. ‘What we’re talking about is the very survival of the way of life that we take for granted. Because if democracy gives way to populism, then a lot of the things we take as given might disappear one day, as has happened in the past.’
