Shifting the Power is one of Comic Relief’s flagship funding programmes, co-funded with the FCDO and delivered alongside Anchor Partners including STAR Ghana Foundation, WACSI, the Zambian Governance Foundation and the Tilitonse Foundation. It’s built around a simple but powerful idea: real change happens when power moves into the hands of the people and communities living closest to the issues, not just the organisations funding them.
For this session, that meant putting young Debate Mate debaters – the same brilliant cohort we’d filmed going head-to-head at 10 Downing Street the year before – front and centre in a live debate on the motion: “This House believes that international aid is most effective when delivered and distributed through local communities.”
Two teams, each made up of two young people and one sector thought leader, went head-to-head – but crucially, the young debaters set the arguments, with the adults on each team following their lead. Before a word was spoken, the room (largely made up of sector professionals) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motion.
What followed didn’t go the way anyone expected: after a genuinely sharp, nuanced debate – one debater, Natara, opened powerfully by speaking about being “Ghanaian, proud Ghanaian” and what her community understands that outsiders can’t – the room’s opinion shifted, and the opposition team ultimately won the debate on the day.
Comic Relief’s own CEO, Samir Patel, sat on the judging panel and later reflected that what swung the result was the quality of the rebuttals and counterarguments on display – the kind of sharp, considered pushback he said he’d love to see more of from adults, let alone teenagers.
Tania, who leads Shifting the Power at Comic Relief, closed the session by reminding the room just how powerful the stories we choose to tell, and the narratives we build around them, really are.
Our brief wasn’t just to film the session – it was to turn it into content that could travel well beyond the room. A conversation this sharp, between voices this important, deserved a life on platforms and in front of audiences far outside Oxford.
We kept the on-the-day setup lean and confident: a three-camera build covering a wide master of the full debate, a close camera on speakers and debaters, and a reaction camera on the audience and partners, with full audio capture across every speaker in the room.
From there, we shaped the raw footage into a clean, full 90-minute session edit, a punchy highlight film built around the strongest soundbites and reactions, and a handful of short, native social cuts designed to carry individual moments — a sharp rebuttal, a passed mic, a reaction — out into feeds on their own.
What struck us most, working alongside this cohort again, was how far these young debaters have come. Watching them hold their own in a genuinely global conversation about power, aid and who gets to tell the story of development – persuasive enough to turn a room of sector professionals around mid-debate – was a reminder of exactly why programmes like Debate Mate and Shifting the Power matter, and why we love being the team trusted to help tell that story.
If you want to learn more about the projects we’re proud to be part of, follow us on social or get in touch – we can’t wait to share more of the work we’re doing to help voices like these travel further.