The Koreo Prize is a storytelling competition asking young people to explore six key issues affecting the UK in a way that acknowledges their complexity, seeking out opposing points of view, understanding that there is rarely one right solution to complex issues. These issues are aligned with the UN's Global Goals and they are gender equality, social mobility, housing, wellbeing, community resilience and food security. We want the participants to show the human side of these issues by telling stories through any creative medium that resounds with the aim to prove that these are relevant to a developed country too.

At Koreo we know that social issues are not clear cut. They are complex, multidisciplinary, and above all about people. Storytelling has always been a powerful tool to connect people and ideas. From Aboriginal Dreamtime to spoken word poetry, storytelling creates a platform through which difficult subjects can be given a voice. This idea led us to wonder: what would happen if we asked young people to tell the stories of the most pressing UK social issues today? We live in unpredictable times. The snow storm of recent political events in combination with the massive impact we are having on our planet, it is easy to lose faith in progress. But now more than ever, we must seek to understand the motivations of people and the complexity of the issues. We must continue to tell the stories of our experience and, in the face of these challenges, focus our attention on ways to regain the ownership of social issues. The UN Goals are bringing a beautiful global narrative but what we really need is to kickstart a participatory conversation with a more accessible knowledge of social problems. The Koreo Prize creates a space to make just that. We all know that understanding a range of perspectives is key to progress and Koreo Prize submissions will explore these problems in fresh and new ways. At the end of the competition we will create a digital archive of the submissions to be shared nationally, creating a powerful body of work, raising awareness and heightening public empathy. And to scale up the competition, we've curated a panel of trailblazing, social change making, cross-sectoral, cross-issue champions amongst which we have: John Vincent, CEO of Leon, Julie Bentley, CEO of Girlguiding, Judith Grant, Head of Wellbeing at Royal Mail, Paul Cleal, Partner at Pw, Anna Taylor, Executive Director of the Food Foundation, Indy Johar, Co-founder Architecture 00, Henrietta Moore, Director of UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity and Gary Haq, Senior Research Associate at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Check our full list of judges here: http://www.koreo.co/blog/koreo-prize-judges/ This is our own interpretation to bring a global narrative for change, systemic change, storytelling and youth together to raise awareness on the relevance of the UN Goals. We see this project as a necessary tool to the implementation of the UN goals in a UK context.

Koreo