Global Youth Forums Project in Kenya

The Innovation Center has partnered with the Global Youth Forums Project in Kenya to support peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability throughout the country.  The project will involve and empower Kenyan youth by creating opportunities for leadership development and increased civic engagement in local, regional and national issues.  

We come to this work in the belief that, in much of the discussion on issues facing young people in developing nations, there is a startling disconnect between the call for youth civic involvement and the need to address a range of youth-related issues (health, education, poverty, employment, etc.).  In other words, while policy recommendations outline the needs of youth, rarely are those needs connected to youth civic engagement, except to present youth engagement as just one more need.  What if, instead, we could shift policy discussions away from youth civic engagement as a need, and toward youth engagement as a strategy for addressing other community-related issues.

To do so would require a shift in public perception about the power and potential of young people to be civic participants and agents of positive social change, coupled with local capacity-building to support youth and adults in community engagement and community change.  This project will begin to shift public perceptions from the ground-up.  It will build the capacity of youth and communities to support youth civic engagement, and will contribute new knowledge about the critical leverage points for youth civic engagement, which can inform policy, shape programs, and simultaneously address very real social issues facing young people.  

Youth and adult partners from each of Kenya’s eight provinces will participate in a national conference and training event.  The conference will prepare the delegates to become moderators of community forums and agents of community change by building skills in collaborative, community-based leadership; creating youth-adult partnerships; mapping community assets; leading community forums; developing community action plans; and training others to lead community forums.  Back in their home provinces, the youth-adult teams will train additional, regional teams.  Together, these teams will explore issues most pressing to their local community and develop action plans for addressing these issues.  “Mini-grants” will seed local projects.

The work is still in the planning and fundraising stages of development; the Innovation Center is thrilled to sponsor this exciting work.  The project’s grass-roots approach to change, coupled with the youth-adult partnership and collective leadership models, has the potential to make a deep impact in the way communities and governments think about young people.

For more information, please contact Carole MacNeil.