 Add Sut I Ym SSI is time for reflection and our time for reflection leader today is John Lawton, dean, chief executive of data lead and founder of Scran academy. Members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you very much for having me here today. It is an honour to address you. The last time I stood in the chamber floor to speak to this room I was in 2008, I was the chair of the youth parliament and I was speaking to a room of MSYPs so I can give feedback on who the tougher audience was. Today I want to share with you one story and perhaps unusually make one confession. The story is of a 12-year-old boy who changed my life. He wrote to himself at the time thinking no one would ever see it with the words, I hate my life, I'm sick of all the drugs, the awful houses, the getting bullied and the crime and that. We didn't see dad now and mum is always depressed on the couch. When I go to sleep I hope I didn't have to wake up and nobody seems to care about people like me. My life will never ever change. Powerful and sad words of hopelessness they remain etch deep onto my heart and words that typify truth for too many of the young people I work with today. We must use our platforms of power to not simply raise ourselves but to build ladders of hope for others to rise. Ladders like Charity Scrant Academy, which I founded five years ago and pivoted during lockdown to help thousands of people most in need. We witnessed the transformational power of local people with authentic lived experience becoming experienced and stepping up to be their own solutions. I promise to your confession that the boy in the diary was me. I stand here today as a proud working-class queer citizen who faced the bullies of trauma and poverty and I chose to not concede, to not give up and to dare to lead, especially in the darkest of times. Ever since my first wee campaign aged 11 in Pylton I try and act with bravery and passion to be an inspiring ginger example to others something we could all choose to do, maybe not the ginger part. We can and must redefine the paradigms of what is possible for people. We can let yesterday's scars become today's strength and I want people to know that our vulnerabilities can become the content of our voices. That is hope. We must have space for vulnerability and openness in our leadership models and examples of today. My purpose is really clear to me, to live today as the adult that the young boy in that diary needed and invite us all to do the same. We are all role models to a young person somewhere. Let's never allow this legislature to settle upon the notion that your life starting point is your life sentence. Let's never settle on the idea that some people from some places are just destined to fail or settle on the idea that radically compassionate change is somehow too big or too hard. Please stay impatient. Let's all build ladders of hope. Let's all be the adults that a generation of kids so desperately need.