Empowering youth for peaceful, inclusive, resilient, healthy and harmonious society.

Youth can be empowered by anyone, be it an individual or a group, or maybe even themselves. There are many ways youth can be empowered, and one of them is through holding events such as workshop, training, and etcetera.

Workshop, training, and such, for example concerning difference in culture, could give information and knowledge about tolerance between people with different background. There would be diversity in the participants making the knowledge they receive fathomable. What the participants learned in an event would be remembered in their minds, making the things they do in their everyday life reflecting back to the knowledge they had received.

Events create opportunity to build a network among people. Events that last for more than one day would create an even stronger connection between people. After an event is held, it is questionable whether the participants keep in touch with one another. Often times, they would know what the other is doing through social media. However, the amount of interaction is rather sparse. Even with the existence of social media, interacting directly face-to-face is still more preferable. A lot of things can be discussed with more comprehension when people meet compared to using social media where it is limited to text.

When people have a history together, they would at times like to meet up with each other. The point of the meet up is usually to hang out and catch up with one another. This applies to people that have attended a certain event. A lot of things can come out from this meet up, such as collaboration, a strengthening of network, or even a project. Taken from personal experience, the people I have met at an event as well as myself have decided to strengthen our network by collaborating and creating a project together. We have a group on social media as a place for us to discuss thing, where we would occasionally meet up just to hang out and chat. During one of our meet up, we had concocted a project concerning the existence of a specific heritage culture. Although the outline of the project is finished, we have not set out to implement it yet. Currently, we are training our writing skills. I had made a suggestion that every month we write about a specific topic and then publish it to our website. My suggestion was accepted, where the others also gave their thoughts on it. We indeed ended up writing based on a topic, and the plan was to have one week to write and the next week to discuss about it and so on. This internal activity is currently in session and hopefully people’s writing skill can improve little by little.

Youth can be empowered by small but meaningful action. Empowering youth does not mean that it has to be big and starts with a bang. What is important when empowering youth is the impact as well as the sustenance, whether it is meaningful or not and whether it will always be there or would just later disappear.