Rethink your Drink

From our project we aim to give more informative insights to younger students and people around our community about the harmful effects of underage drinking. We want people to have an understanding of why drinking is not a fun or cool matter and that it can have serious consequences. We hope to reduce the numbers of underage drinking and drinking related hospital admissions around our area and the rest of Ireland .

Our Social Issue

Collectively as a group we decided to base our YSI project on a social issue of underage drinking. We chose to address this topic as underage drinking has hit an all time high and young people are not fully educated on the topic and it’s later side effects.

Why We Chose It

We chose this issue as we as a group recognized how common and normalized underage drinking has become in Ireland. In recent years the number of teenagers drinking underage has increased which has resulted in an increase in the amount of accidents and even deaths caused by underage drinking. This is also a big problem in society as drinking from a young age can lead to people being more likely to develop drinking problems in the future. With our project we aim to reduce the amount of teenagers underage drinking and we hope to educate younger students about this issue.

Our Goal

Our group decided to do our YSI project on underage drinking and we titled our project "Rethink your drink". We decided to do our project on underage drinking as we recognized how common it is to start drinking from a young age and it has become extremely normalized among people our age , and this is what we aim to change. We began by researching articles about underage drinking to try and gain an understanding of severity of this issue. We then began to think of ideas as to how we could spread awareness to young people to stop this problem becoming more prevalent in young people in the future. we decided that we will give a presentation to both first year students as well as primary schools. This will give these young people and understanding of the dangers of alcohol and will hopefully prevent them in underage drinking in the future.

Our Innovative Action

We created a presentation to educate first year students on the dangers of underage drinking. In this presentation we will give them a kahoot and questionnaire asking the questions about alcohol. We made an Instagram page @rethinkurdrink1 to inform people about our project and update them on the progress we are making and to spread more awareness on underage drinking. We also emailed the minister of health as we wanted to speak to her about our project as we hope that she will both support us and give us advice as to how we can improve our project.

Our Impact

By educating both first year and 6th class students on the dangers and effects of alcohol we hop to stop them from tyring alcohol until they are the right age to do so. In doing this it will also reduce the amount of accidents and even deaths caused by underage risking.