The second series of the Gates Cambridge podcast, So, now what? will celebrate the scholarship's 25th anniversary
The core message is that we need to focus more on relationships at school because we know that for adolescents these are so central and they can be a really powerful experience towards creating positive change. But we tend to focus so much on academics that we lose sight of that a little bit.
Emma Soneson
Three Gates Cambridge Scholars debate how to make the world a better place for young people in the first episode of the 25th anniversary edition of the Gates Cambridge podcast, So, now what? – out now.
Kevin Beckford, Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer and Emma Soneson discuss everything from the stereotyping of young people to how to empower them to be part of important discussions about the future in difficult times.
Kevin Beckford [2011] is the co-founder and a board member of The Hustlers Guild, a non-profit that uses hip hop to expand access and opportunity to Black and Latinx youth in the innovation space. He is also Senior Associate, Parnerships and Engagement at the Pretrial Justice Institute. From 2020 to 2022 he was an Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity from 2020 to 2022 and from 2014-2016, Kevin worked in the White House Presidential Correspondence Office. He also served as a special advisor to Secretary Julian Castro at the US Department of Housing and Development.
Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer [2021] is a final year PhD student at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge working on social inequalities and socioemotional difficulties during adolescence.
Emma Soneson [2018] is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry. She maintains a broad research profile within the field of child and adolescent mental health but is especially interested in the intersections between mental health and education.
Beckford talks about his work with the Hustlers Guild, for instance, an initiative called Don’t Shoot Guns, Shoot Cameras that they ran with black teenagers who were given cameras, training and support to record their lives. He recalls one girl who said at the end of the summer camp that she didn’t know that there was such beauty and such power in the community she lived in. Beckford commented: “She said I found my voice in doing this project, I found myself. I’m proud to say she is now a film student in college so she’s now studying film and she hopes to become a filmmaker and her orientation to film is capturing untold stories of black and brown folk.”
Pi-Sunyer speaks about her research about the importance of context and environment in supporting young people’s well being. She has been looking at how living in urban and densely populated environments might represent a particular form of adversity for young people and how providing greener environments and spaces where young people can socialise and explore with their peers without their parents are vital to healthy development.
Soneson also talks about the importance of relationships. She speaks about the Dream School project she has been working on. It came out of research during the pandemic which found that, despite many children suffering from school closures, a lot of young people felt happier when they didn’t have to go to school. That caused her to question what it was about school that contributed to poor mental health and how this could be improved. She said: “The core message is that we need to focus more on relationships at school because we know that for adolescents these are so central and they can be a really powerful experience towards creating positive change. But we tend to focus so much on academics that we lose sight of that a little bit.”
The episode is the first of eight in the new anniversary series which will cover everything from astronomy and biodiversity to new research into ageing societies. The podcasts will be posted on the last Tuesday of the month with the February podcast being about innovative ways to get your message heard in a noisy world.
Listen to the first episode here.
