Youth learn how to implement their ideas

A summer school for active youth from the communities where “Global education goes local” project works has been hold in July 10-15 2019 in Lozenetz, Bulgaria. The school was aimed to get the teenagers familiar with the Sustainable development goals and to coach them how to plan and implement their ideas. 25 youth at the age of 15-18 from the towns of Sandanski, Novi Pazar, Kostinbrod, Razgrad and the village of Kurtovo Konare took part in the summer school.

Gender equality, responsible consumption and sustainable cities have been the three learning topics. Based on interactive games, simulations and discussions the teens have been introduced to the challenges of the topics. The youth have been trained how to plan an initiative starting with analyzing the problems and the needs, looking for solutions and planning the implementation.

While rewriting the texts of well known songs and thinking about which are their favourite movies and street artists the participants explored more about how to use the popular culture in popularizing the topics of the Sustainable development goals among their peers.

Eighteen of the participants evaluate the training “as very useful” and four as useful. Motivated to work at local level, the discussions on the SDG-s, the games are part of what the participants appreciated the most in the summer school.  “I understand better the aims, the “how to” and the causes”, shares another participant in the additional comments in the feedback forms. Other appreciates ”The topics concern the future”.  

The informal sharing of their impressions and learning points include that the participants learned a lot about how other youths are seeing and thinking about nowaways challenges, they better understand the SDGs and why it is so important to work on achieving important social changes.

The “learning by doing” process will have as follow up the Local action plans and the campaigns that participants will implement based on their ideas in September 2019 – February 2020.

Informed and inspired by the interesting ideas they spoke about during the sessions connected with the three SDGs the participants have now many ideas on how to work on each of them back in their communities, such as organizing concerts, recycling workshops, making graffiti with messages connected with the SDGs, etc.

At the end of the summer school we saw that the participants became the global super heroes they created themselves in the beginning of it.

We can’t wait to see where that journey together will take us.