Darren Keenan first experienced prejudice when he was six. He was living with his mum and her partner, who both used drugs, and he’d often be out on the streets alone until after midnight. “The local community centre was where I would spend most of my days,” he says. “There was a gang there, but I didn’t know it was a gang. Every now and again, they used to give me £2 to go and get chicken and chips.” On one occasion, while in the shop, he was confronted by a group of white people in their 20s who mocked him and called him a “chav fuck”. “They didn’t know my circumstances,” Keenan says, softly spoken and with the build of a rugby player. “I was still trying to go to school by myself. It annoyed me that they stereotyped me a certain way.”

That Keenan, now 20, has had a tough time is an understatement. He has been in care, suffered depression and anxiety, and now lives with his grandmother in Brixton. He is also passionately political and determined to fight inequality. Last July, he gave a speech in parliament about opportunities for working-class people.

Keenan is one of a group of activists who have recently graduated from the Advocacy Academy, a social justice fellowship that develops the knowledge, skills and confidence of young people in south London. The graduates, who range in age between 17 and 20, have spent eight months, including three residential retreats, working with campaigners, politicians, academics and coaches to help them begin their own grassroots campaigns. The courses, which have been running for three years and take place everywhere from community and youth centres to universities (even the Imperial War Museum), have the intensity of an A-level: there are lessons in public speaking, social media skills and press relations. Each student has the opportunity to make a speech in parliament, after one-to-one tuition from vocal coaches at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Darren Keenan: ‘I want to run for councillor, GLA member, MP. I want to climb the ranks.’ Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

In late February, I attended the academy’s graduation ceremony, sitting among a throng of friends and relatives, all chatting excitedly as they took their places in front of a stage lit by a cascade of fairy lights. As the ceremony started, the audience watched Keenan perform a spoken word piece, with the other graduates making up a sort of Greek chorus: “People see/A mixed race guy/with a slit in his eye;/Obviously means he’s about to/Commit a crime.”

Keenan is the polar opposite of the kind of shouty, upper-middle-class agitator you might expect to find lobbying parliament. The campaign he helped lead through the academy was for affordable housing in his area. Brixton has seen rapid gentrification in the last few years, and locals such as Keenan are priced out. “A lot of young people my age can’t imagine ever being able to afford to buy or rent a place,” he says. After two years of lobbying, the graduates succeeded in getting Lambeth council to commit to building the borough’s first Community Land Trust, and to work with them to find a site within the year. Keenan co-chaired the meeting.

“The reality of what it’s like to be a young person in marginalised communities in England is pretty horrifying,” says Amelia Viney, founder and director of the Advocacy Academy (and, at 29, not exactly old herself). “The level of isolation is pronounced. To see a kid with incredible potential, who in a privileged community would have gone on to achieve phenomenal things, be stunted by their lack of opportunity – it’s very problematic.”

You physically live in the shadow of parliament. It’s there, you can see it every day, but you think of it as Mars

Viney got the idea for the academy while working in the House of Commons as a researcher for Labour MP John Mann. “Quite honestly, I despised it,” she says. “Everyone in that godforsaken place is part of the most exclusive club in the world. There was something about leaving every day, and then going home to Stockwell, and in that journey recognising what invisible boundaries look like. You physically live in the shadow of parliament. It’s there, you can see it every day, but you think of it as Mars.”

But, against the odds, Keenan and the other academy graduates made it to Mars. Keenan has also completed work experience with his local Labour MP, Helen Hayes, and in the run-up to the general election is working on a Labour phone bank. “I want to have a career in activism and campaigning,” he says. “But, later down the line, I want to run for councillor, GLA member, MP. I want to climb the ranks.”

***

Young people these days. They don’t care about anything, let alone politics. They’re too busy editing their selfies to think seriously about the kind of society they want. They’re far too lazy to vote, so really, how can they complain when politics doesn’t turn out the way they want?

Sound familiar? The outcome of the 2015 general election, coupled with the Brexit vote, has seen the gulf between the generations break wide open. Of those who voted, 75% of 18 to 24-year-olds wanted to remain in the EU. Young remainers were furious with pensioner voters, 64% of whom voted for Brexit. In turn, initial (and incorrect) reports of a low youth turnout – 64% of registered 18 to 24-year-olds voted, not 36% as was originally reported – led to older generations criticising young people’s supposed apathy. While they might not be joining mainstream parties in their droves, a growing number of teens and twentysomethings are getting involved in social change in diverse and creative ways.

Another organisation, Campaign Bootcamp, runs regular training weekends for activists from all walks of life (Keenan has just won a place). In February, it announced the Save the Children Jo Cox memorial scholarship, which will pay for three women to attend bootcamps. The organisation will run up to 10 six-day camps this year, with 35 people trained on each.

“Interest in Bootcamp has continued to rise, especially after Brexit,” says executive director Johnny Chatterton. “There’s a growing realisation that you can’t sit back and assume the country will become more progressive. We are seeing more and more people wanting to campaign on issues they care about, but also things that maybe in the past they may have taken for granted.”

Chatterton was working in the non-profit sector when he and six others set up Bootcamp in 2012, after realising that they were only hiring people who were just like them: white, middle-class graduates.

“How can you tackle justice and inequality if you have no experience of it?” he asks. “The best people to push for change are those with direct experience. We set up Bootcamp to try to bridge that gap.”

Angelica Attah is 20 and a Bootcamp graduate. In the aftermath of the EU referendum, she ran the social media accounts for the campaign Post Ref Racism, which documented the rise in hate crimes and racist and xenophobic incidents. She also participates in grassroots feminism, campaigned against the deportation of a Nigerian woman who was being held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Buckinghamshire, and is a passionate member of Reclaim Holloway in London, a coalition fighting for the eight-acre Holloway prison site to be used for affordable housing and women’s support services.

“I was always really interested in politics,” Attah says. “I come from an immigrant Nigerian family, and it is political, when you’re black and British. Race politics is something I’ve been attuned to my entire life.”

The way you make people feel that they belong in a powerful place is by teaching them to be formidable in those spaces

Though initially keen on mainstream politics, a work experience placement in parliament changed her viewpoint. “I went there and thought it was horrible. It was just pale, male, stale: old white men. Someone thought I was a cleaner. Some people were nice, but MPs just chat shit. It’s all spin, it’s all rhetoric, you don’t feel like change is happening in that environment.”

Instead, she applied for a place on Campaign Bootcamp. “It helped me realise that there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle; everything is linked. It was good to see lots of people doing lots of different things: environmental issues, social justice, feminism, politics. Making connections, sharing ideas and resources, and then you have this whole support network that you can draw on. We had some practical sessions on how to strategise, how to win.”

“It was the most incredibly diverse space,” agrees Tom Ross-Williams, 30, a fellow Bootcamp graduate who describes himself as queer, and now goes into schools to work with young men on challenging gender stereotypes. “That is what [Bootcamp] specialises in; making connections between people from very disparate areas.”

The organisation is now launching a training programme called Everyday Activism that will train between 400-600 people in Yorkshire this year. “There are so many people across the UK who want to make their voices heard but don’t have the skills and the training,” Chatterton says.

It’s not just twentysomethings who want to speak up. Reclaim is a social change organisation based in Manchester and focused on supporting working-class young people from the age of 12. It recruits from schools and youth clubs, and aims to start conversations with young people about social activism, as well as making them aware of the structures that have led to their being disadvantaged in life. “It’s about disrupting mainstream narratives, challenging the status quo,” says Georgia Rigg, the alumni programme lead.

In the run-up to the referendum, Reclaim ran a campaign called Locked Out, about young working-class people being excluded from the political decision-making process. They went to London and campaigned outside media organisations. “Nobody cared, to be honest,” Rigg says. “We got no coverage, no one wanted to discuss it with us. They were like, ‘If they’re not 18 and they can’t vote, then we’re not interested in having a conversation with them.’”

Frustrated by the referendum result, Samuel Remi-Akinwale and Elijah Walters-Othman, 17-year-olds who are friends from school, launched a new campaigning arm of Reclaim called Team Future. Both are from Manchester (Akinwale is of Nigerian origin and Othman Jamaican) and passionate about exposing police racism. When Akinwale was 13, he ran a campaign about Stephen Lawrence, putting up adverts all around town that read: “Manchester has not forgotten you, Stephen Lawrence”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel Remi-Akinwale and Elijah Walters-Othman: ‘We have the hope, ideas and creativity, but we aren’t given platforms.’ Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

One of the things that turns young working-class people off politics, Othman argues, is “the distance from those in power. They feel very alien: from the clothes, to the private education, to the privilege. Many working-class young people can’t relate to them, so there’s a massive distance – geographically, too, for us in Manchester.” Education also plays a big role, he says. “When you go to a private school, you’re told from a young age that you’ll be a leader of society. In state schools, we aren’t given those high expectations. We’re just left to our [own] devices.”

“We don’t get an opportunity to explore politics,” Akinwale adds. “There’s no space for conversation or discussion or critical thinking. We have the hope, ideas and creativity, but we aren’t given platforms.”

It’s ironic, really: older people swung the vote, but they won’t be here as long as us. We have to live with this

Othman and Akinwale hope that Team Future will become a mass youth movement. Already, they have collected contributions from more than 5,000 12 to 22-year-olds in Greater Manchester to shape their manifesto. “If young people were allowed to vote, [the referendum result] could have been different,” Othman says. “And that was the shifting point that made me excited; it gave me the motivation to campaign for young people’s voices. It’s about our future. It’s ironic, really: older people swung the vote, but they won’t be here as long as us. We have to live with this, but they made that decision for us. No consultation. We were pushed to the side.”

***

When you are young and lack privilege, there are a number of factors that might decrease your likelihood of engaging with democracy: your postcode, race, sexuality, gender or disability; the language spoken at home, your immigration status; the housing bracket you sit in; the security of your parents’ jobs. On top of all that, you often face the extra barrier of not knowing the “right sort of people” to give you a leg up.

One of the things that Campaign Bootcamp taught Fatima Awil, 20, from Bristol, was how to network. She is Somali, and has been campaigning against female genital mutilation within her community since she was a young teenager, first as part of a youth group and then as part of Forward (Foundation for Women’s Health Research and Development). She took part in the Girl Summit, an event aimed at mobilising domestic and international efforts to end FGM and child or forced marriage within a generation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fatima Awil: ‘You can achieve so much more if you have connections.’ Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

Awil enrolled for Campaign Bootcamp because she wanted more formal training, having picked up campaigning skills as she went along. “I learned that you can achieve so much more if you have connections, and you don’t have to exhaust yourself. You can plan your campaign in a strategic way.” It also gave her more confidence. “There was a day when we did coding and HTML. I went in thinking, ‘Oh no: it’s computers.’ And I came out so glad that I did it, because I understood it a little better. That was empowering.”

Similarly empowering is the emphasis on telling your own story as a way of communicating the urgent need for a more equal society. When I sit down with some of the Advocacy Academy graduates, they tell me about the lives they have led – with a certain shyness, but also with a sense of ownership that prompts Amelia Viney to interject and tell one of them, “That’s the best I’ve heard you tell it so far.”

How do you solve Britain's youth voting crisis? Read more

Though the academy has a zero dropout rate, there are, inevitably, challenges to recruitment – largely a sense of entrenched powerlessness, Viney says. Add to that the fact that the young people they work with often have complex home lives, which is why the residential model – putting the young campaigners up in hostels – works so well.

Ilhan Yonis, 17, is from London and of Somali origin. Like many of the young people I meet, she tries to minimise any hardship in her past, saying, “I don’t want to say that I grew up in poverty, because I wasn’t, like, begging on the streets, but the housing situation was a bit shit. I was sharing a bed with my two sisters, and my brothers were sharing a bunk-bed in the same room. My parents and little sister were in the other room.” She is frank about the racism she has encountered: “I’m black and I’m Muslim. There was no escape; 9/11 happened when I was two. Islamophobia is all I have ever known.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ilhan Yonis wants to improve relationships between council staff and those who use their services. Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

One of Yonis’s fellow academy graduates, Amal Warsame, came to national attention when a video she created of her and her friends asking for a meeting with the Sun and the Daily Mail regarding their misleading headlines about Muslims went viral. Yonis was in the video, but her own campaign was much smaller in scope: it was inspired by her mother, who was always going back and forth to the council to try to sort out their housing situation, where she found little sympathy and often open rudeness. “My mum would come back so devastated. Being a young person, you can’t just go and shout at the council, ‘Don’t speak to my mum like that.’ The face of defeat she’d come home with, it broke me.” She tears up momentarily. “And my mum is… all I’ve ever known throughout my life. I have a stepdad, but my dad’s never been in my life.”

Her campaign aims to improve relationships between council staff and those who use their services. On Valentine’s Day, she gave out chocolates and cards to both parties, encouraging them to be more understanding and patient. She has since set up a meeting with the director of policy at her local council.

Azal Nadeem, 19, used her academy training to campaign on homelessness. She suffered religious persecution in her native Pakistan (she is an Ahmadi Muslim) and her family was made homeless when her father’s shop was burned down. As an asylum seeker in Britain, she faced daily racism at primary and secondary school. While they were living in north-east England, her father came home with a broken arm and a bloody nose after being attacked. Now she has set up an Instagram account, @mystreetbuddy, where, in between studying for her A-levels, she documents homeless people’s struggles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Azal Nadeem: ‘When you see your parents struggling, it hurts so much more. That’s why we have that ambition.’ Photograph: Thomas Butler/The Guardian

Like many of the young campaigners I meet, Nadeem feels she owes it to her parents, and to their sacrifices, to try to make change. “It’s difficult if you are struggling,” Keenan says, “but when you see your parents struggling, it hurts so much more. That’s why we have that ambition.”

Seeing the confidence that Campaign Bootcamp, the Advocacy Academy and Reclaim have given these activists makes me wonder why political campaigning isn’t on the school curriculum. Viney’s goal is that one day it will be, arguing that traditional models of social mobility need to be challenged. “I don’t think that if I take my kids at Advocacy Academy and put them in a fancy restaurant, or parliament, or KPMG, they are going to wake up one day and think, ‘My God, I belong here.’ The way you make people feel that they belong in a powerful place is by teaching them how to be formidable in those spaces. It’s about the invisible hands that guide people there.”

Not all of these young campaigners will go on to work in politics, of course, though most are politically engaged. The vast majority I speak to plan to vote Labour, or would do if they were old enough. Attah expresses admiration for Jeremy Corbyn, mentioning that grime artist JME has expressed his support for the Labour leader. “Most of my friends are leftwing, and I’m in this weird echo chamber,” she says. Some of her friends argue that you shouldn’t legitimise the system by voting. “But come on, you can’t just sit there and theorise. There’s an actual choice to be made. It’s serious.”

Still, she has no desire to enter mainstream politics herself. “I think we need to reframe our understanding of what politics is,” she says. “Politics is everything: it’s housing, it’s gentrification, it’s homelessness, it’s mental health, it’s domestic violence. All these things are going on, and people are fighting them and organising to survive. We have to. And young people really care.”

• Some names have been changed.