Due to the many (often hilarious) questions, we get about our funding and content written by young people here is a fun FAQ detailing how we keep doing what we do best


Who funds Shout Out UK?

If you are hoping for a ‘shady’ left or right-wing think-tank or foundation, then we are sorry to disappoint. Since our incorporation in 2015, we have received precisely £0.00 in core funding. We have also received £0.00 in funding from any political party.

We did receive £85,000 in investment funding in 2016 from SFC Capital to ‘kick things off’. We have received £0.00 in investment funding since then.

As a social enterprise, we rely on our various income streams to ‘keep the lights on’. Our primary income streams are from schools, parents, and individuals buying our workshops/courses or subscribing to our SOUK Ed platform.

We also regularly bid for (and thankfully win) government and NGO education or civic engagement tenders. More details on some of our projects can be found here.

We do, at times, also receive grants to support a project or to fund our courses/workshops in schools that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. These have come from the JRRT, Nesta, and the Paul Hamilton Foundation and account for roughly 15% of our total income.

 

What kind of donations does Shout Out UK receive?
None.

 

Why do you capitalise Political Literacy & Media Literacy when they shouldn’t be?
We capitalise them, turning them into proper nouns because they will be proper subjects in school one day.

 

But… your posts on Youth Voice are biased, so you’re biased!!! (Post Opinion Disclaimer)

As it says on our about page (which we suggest reading… it’s not dull we promise), we provide a platform for young people to voice their opinions on a variety of issues. The posts on our website are not endorsed by or the opinions of Shout Out UK, but, exclusively the views of the author. We do not censor unless the post is hate speech or factually incorrect. This means that our posts on Youth Voice can often end up talking positively and negatively about the same issue within the same 48hrs.

We stand by giving young people a platform to voice their opinions, and opinions are naturally biased. So yes, the posts written by young people on our platform are biased. However, as we will publish all and every side of an argument, we mitigate that bias with a strictly non-partisan, unbiased, completely open platform, and organisational structure.

In short, we are a non-partisan social enterprise that primarily focuses on teaching how our democracy works and how to analyse the information we consume critically. Then, if you have a well-informed opinion, based on factual evidence, we will offer you a platform to share it.

 

Why do you get so many questions about your bias and funding?

People often don’t like reading or learning what they don’t agree with, and it’s easier to try and discredit the source than it is to enter a proper debate about the topic the source is discussing.

Political Literacy and Media Literacy are very complex and controversial issues, nobody wants to hear that they need to become politically and media literate, despite this being correct more often than not.

Although our team and budget are incredibly small, we are excited by how much we can impact the public debate. Real democracy can only occur if every citizen receives political literacy and media literacy education regardless of their socio-economic background, ethnicity, or gender. So we will continue our work and let the haters hate.