It often strikes me when I meet teenagers how much they defy the stereotypes you constantly hear about them: always on social media, not interested in anything much, unambitious – you know the sort of thing. It certainly doesn’t apply to young people like Finlay Campbell.

I met Finlay, who’s 14, at an event at Dumfries House this week to celebrate a programme organised by The Prince’s Foundation called Food for the Future. The aim of the project, run as a pilot in four schools, is to give kids a better understanding of how the food industry works and hopefully also to reduce the amount of food that they, and the rest of us, throw out.

Finlay, who lives in New Cumnock in East Ayrshire, was one of the pupils who took part in the project and it was great to hear how it encouraged his interests. Not only does he love food (favourite memory: his granny’s mince and tatties), he likes to cook (signature dish: chicken curry) and his ambition is to become a chef. Ideally, he would like to stay in the area he knows and loves rather than have to move to a big city.

The thing is though: it isn’t easy for a lot of kids from areas like East Ayrshire, which is rural and green and beautiful but also has a high level of deprivation and poverty. As well as Finlay, I spoke to one of his teachers at Robert Burns Academy, Rebecca Scullion, who worries about the fact that in more deprived areas, the knowledge and skills around food can be limited, diets can be poor, and there can be a severe lack of choice in shopping.

It is also, I think, a problem that’s hard to see. We tend to think of poverty in terms of urban areas, big housing estates, big cities, and so on, and think of the countryside as a place where rich people go to live. It can also be hard to get our heads round the disconnect between the cliché of the rural idyll and beautiful Scotland and the fact that in pockets of the countryside, poverty is just as bad, if not worse, than it is in the cities.

So the question is: how do you help, and specifically how do you ensure that kids who grow up in areas of rural deprivation are given more opportunities to prosper? One of the other people I spoke to at the event, which was attended by Prince Charles, was Iona Murray, whose family has a sheep farm near Muirkirk. She is also the farming and rural skills coordinator at Dumfries House and she has one or two ideas about how to make things better.

Broadly, says Iona, it’s about better connecting kids who live in rural communities to their area and the opportunities that might be there. She points out that a young person can be surrounded by acres of land but if they’re never leaving their town (possibly because they can’t afford to), they might as well be in the middle of a city. “So it’s about broadening horizons,” she says, “and educating them about what’s out there. Life can be big.”

Iona is now attempting to make that connection with Food for the Future. Part of the project, she says, is about looking at possible careers that exist in the countryside – farming, butchery, hospitality – jobs that kids living in poverty in villages or towns might not even know exist in their part of the country. As part of the plan, a new training centre is being built at Dumfries House and one of its main aims will be to bridge the gap and give local kids the skills they need to go and work in the rural sector.

Yes, it’s a relatively small project on a relatively small scale, but the point is it’s beginning to address a problem that’s been badly neglected. Poverty is still poverty even when it’s surrounded by beautiful countryside, but the solutions may have to be slightly different. One of the first steps is guiding the kids to the possible opportunities and hopefully, like Finlay, watching them thrive.

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