Four teenage girls who are campaigning to change attitudes to body image on the high street have been nominated for a Community Pride award.

The awards run by The Press are in recognition of those who unselfishly give their time to help others and the girls have been put forward for the Spirit of Youth category by Elaine Armstrong, the school’s assistant head teacher, who said: “I congratulate the students on their initiative – this is exactly the kind of active citizenship we encourage in school.”

The Press has followed the progress of Molly Horner, 13, Lucy Freer, 14, Megan Guest, 14, and Alison Coates, 13, since they started a campaign last year as part of a school citizenship project which came about after the girls were walking through town one day and saw only thin, airbrushed photos of models in shop windows.

Most recently they were contacted by the Radio 4 magazine show Woman’s Hour and asked to talk about their campaign challenging shopkeepers to promote positive body confidence and replace images of airbrushed models with unaltered pictures of customers within their stores.

Alison said: “Having more people being aware of our campaign has been fantastic because now lots of people can realise how fake these photos are and can take action on the issue.”

The girls have since set up a blog and Twitter account and are in talks with the Coppergate Centre in York to take their campaign forward.

They can be contacted via their blog positivebodyimageyork.wordpress.com and Facebook page facebookcom/pages/York-Campaign-forBody-Confidence and on Twitter @BodyConfidenceY

The Community Pride Awards are run in partnership with City of York Council and sponsored by Benenden Health. You can nominate via The Press website by visiting yorkpress.co.uk/news/communitypride