LOUGHTON: Student picked to star in Channel 4 campaign (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

LOUGHTON: Student picked to star in Channel 4 campaign

2:51pm Wednesday 14th January 2009 in Epping Forest News By James Colasanti

A BUBBLY student has been signed up by Channel 4 to help spearhead a campaigning project aimed at inspiring teenagers to use the web to tackle social issues such as poverty, self-harm and knife crime.

Siobhan Maycraft, 20, of High Beech Road, Loughton, is one of only a handful of young people from across the country to be picked for the prestigious Battlefront project.

With her friend Becky Stone, 20, from Ipswich, she has devised the Make a Big Change - With your Small Change project, which highlights how the donation of loose change can make a life-altering difference to impoverished children the world over.

The friends put themselves forward for the Battlefront project after returning home from working with children in the slums of Nairobi, in Kenya.

Battlefront, which sees publishing and marketing mentors working with young people on 20 individual projects, uses its website to publicise campaigns through videos, blogs and discussion forums.

The site features contributions from people including Troy Kennedy, who wants to persuade Coca-Cola to distribute condoms in the developing world to help battle Aids, and Zoe Draper, who hopes to encourage a healthy body image among teenagers in the UK.

A feature on Battlefront was broadcast on Channel 4 in November last year, and Siobhan and Becky are set to appear in a follow-up programme in June.

Siobhan, a drama student at the East 15 Acting School in Loughton, said: "We were the 20th and final campaign to be recruited for Battlefront, and it is a great opportunity to support a cause we feel very passionately about.

"We found out that it costs just 15p a day to send a child to school in Nairobi, and that amount of money goes nowhere over here.

“So that's our message really - dig out that loose change and help make a real difference to people who really need it."

Matt Locke, Channel 4 commissioner for new media education, said: "On the web there are lots of ways to co-ordinate change. We wanted to show teens how to get involved and make those changes happen in your life, showing what those campaigns need."

For more information log-on to battlefront.co.uk.