Updates from the Youth Leadership for Emerging Future programme

It has been more than four months since the kickoff of the Youth Leadership for Emerging Future programme and the first in-person meetings in Warsaw and Prague. During this time, the young leaders worked actively on the projects addressing challenges they had observed in their communities.

Youth Leadership for Emerging Future is a programme in which Ashoka, Save the Children and the Humanitarian Leadership Academy join forces to empower young local leaders from Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia who are working for their communities and are catalysts for systemic change.

Insights and Challenges

Before the launch, the Ashoka team in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia had conducted the scoping research to prepare for the Youth Leadership for Emerging Future programme. After contacting over 200 young people from Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Slovakia about their priorities and challenges, the team identified 6 insightful lessons from young leaders:

1. Need for True Participation: Young leaders are ready to be actively involved in decision-making processes, not just be symbolically present.
2. Pressing Workload: Many young people need support due to combining multiple responsibilities such as education, work, and activism.
3. Financial Challenges: Young people face the lack of paid roles and the expectation of them working for free as activists.
4. Burnout and Mental Health Struggles: There are often no support systems for young people experiencing burnout and mental health issues due to high pressure and overload.
5. Collaboration and Skill Development: Young changemakers feel the need for mentorship, skill-building, and learning opportunities.
6. Need for a Changemaker Community: The feeling of being isolated affects young leaders and they feel a strong need for peer support networks.

It was important for us to recognize these challenges and create a space for young leaders to allow them to address the majority, if not all of them. We believe that it is a way to empower the voice of young leaders and equip them with the tools to be ready for what the future will bring.

Changemakers’ projects

Under the programme, the young leaders received four grants for cooperation. They formed teams to work on initiatives to identify and solve specific social challenges. All the teams are working with HLA mentors who support them in making their projects more thought through and impactful.

To support the NGO and civil society sector, the young leaders in Ukraine decided to create Community Activists’ Workshop ‘United’. It aims to develop a network of Ukrainian social activists and leaders to share experiences and best practices and to provide mutual support. They aspire to accelerate positive changes including improving support for people with migrant and refugee backgrounds.

Maria Andruchiv, Youth Leadership for Emerging Future participant, shared:

– Identifying the topic has been a long process… We were searching for the weak point in our activism work, which helped us focus on the main problem we are now working on. We want to build a strong community of Ukrainian activists working in the humanitarian, integration, migration, cultural identification, and refugee-supporting spheres. This will help us to react to the upcoming crisis better and faster, and also to share our good practices with other humanitarian sphere leaders.

We were amazed by the amount of applications that we got during the recruitment process. We reached out to a group of very engaged and active community leaders in Ukraine and four countries of the European Union. This is a huge achievement for us already.

When & where: 19-21 September, Mukachevo, Ukraine.

The second project Innovation in crisis intervention – piloting Socialeasator is an innovative social network designed by an international team. Its aim is to provide a platform for social interaction, expert counseling, fundraising, and shared learning to help people find quick solutions to their health or social challenges, addressing their immediate needs effectively. The team aspires to pilot Socialeasator in Slovakia and prepare ground for further expansion into Czech Republic, targeting people in need or facing crisis situations, doctors and specialists, and opinion leaders and influencers.

Miroslav Béreš, Youth Leadership for Emerging Future participant, highlighted:

– By implementing our project we expect to get valuable information to set up our system better. In the end, our target groups will benefit from this project in the long term – that is the most important.

The most exciting part of the process is teamwork. It is always amazing to create an inclusive space for people from different backgrounds. I believe that we all can learn a lot from this process. Every member of our team wants to be a better human being and specialist. We are looking forward to seeing the results.

“Universities for the Future” project by another international team set an ambitious aim to start changes in the European higher education system through the creation of an interdisciplinary paper and public discussions. This group of young changemakers works on a report summarising the results of the interviews with students, including those with refugee and migration experience, which will contain three scenarios for the development of higher education systems with and without intervention. They plan to share it with 30 public people from the education sector.

Anton Slesarenko, Youth Leadership for Emerging Future participant, told us:

– As a team, we agreed that:

• We recognise our responsibility for the future.
• Changes in communities start with education.
• The project can be a cause for us to interact with interesting experts and young people and an opportunity to start building relationships.

– [By implementing this project we expect] to build a foundation for strong relationships with experts, increase the team’s knowledge of the higher education system to participate and initiate public discussions, share our discoveries through the article and the conference, taking the first step towards discussing the future of higher education.

When & where: 22 September, Kraków, Poland

Youth Dialogue Forum 2024 is a hybrid format event to increase youth civic engagement. During the event, the team aspires to identify barriers of participation in community activities and look for solutions on how to overcome them. The team aims to create a complex report mapping the process design and implementation with potential ideas for youth civic participation improvement.

Michal Horsky, Youth Leadership for Emerging Future participant, underlined:

– Engaging citizens in new democratic forums and building bridges through innovative methods lies at the heart of our work in DEMDIS. As we’re seeing the unfulfilled potential of youth engagement and cross-border cooperation, we wanted to contribute with a potential solution. Youth Dialogue Forum (YDF) is an exciting experiment and the answer to the question: How could civic and youth engagement look like, when we have the opportunity to experiment?

Our expectation is to create recommendations for civic organisations and communities to improve youth engagement in their ecosystem. On top of that, we want to test and evaluate this unique YDF model and hope to gain valuable experiences through which we can do these kinds of forums better.

When & where: 20-22 September, Kraków, Poland

More networking!

Some of the programme participants took part in Ashoka Changemaker Summit 2024 in Hamburg, Germany (Note: the summit is not part of the Youth Leadership for Emerging future programme). This gave them the opportunity to meet the wider Ashoka changemakers community, create new connections, and hear from the experience of their peers and senior colleagues from around the globe.

Meet the young leaders

On this page you can find out more about each participant of the programme. Read about leading volunteering groups, supporting the rights of IDPs, running social start-ups, and cultural events, conducting youth mentorship and counseling, and other inspiring activities they are already implementing to make a change.

What’s next?

All the projects will be implemented by the end of September 2024. Till mid-October, the programme participants will work on their projects reports and exchange valuable lessons learnt.

The Youth Leadership for Emerging Future programme will be completed and celebrated during the final event on 28-29 November in Warsaw, Poland. The first day will be a youth festival organised by Community Keepers for all the participants of the project. It will be followed by an open day to talk about insights, reflections and plans for the future. This event will also provide the opportunity for the young leaders to celebrate their achievements together, in line with one of the main goals of the programme – creating an international network and a community.