Global Changemakers

Participating in Guildford 2009 was an unforgettable experience for me, full of new opportunities and knowledge. Spending a week with 57 young, motivated people, was encouraging for me, as I learned many new things from them, exchanged ideas, talked about our concerns and difficulties we are facing on the way to make the world a better place to live.

Before coming to Guildford, I didn’t’ even know that there are so many young people in the world, who are committed to make a difference and spend their time and effort to accomplish their ideas. This is how I got the main idea for my CAP….

When I communicated with these young people representing almost 50 different nations, I thought for a second why the youth of my country is so impassionate, inactive, and careless. Why they cannot come together, set up their goals and find ways to achieve them. So I decided to establish a youth group in my community who will implement various projects, engage other people, and help young people to find opportunities for their career development. This is the core idea of my CAP and I will do it in this way.

First of all, I will do a research, aiming to target the bright, motivated, and forward looking young people from my community.  As I want to choose the best of them (10-15 most brilliant and open-minded ones) I will make application forms, announcements to disperse to schools, colleges and NGO’s which work and operate in my community. I’ll also visit educational, recreational centers (places where young people mostly like to visit) tell them about my idea, why I am doing it and what I expect to achieve with my project.

When all application forms will be distributed and one-month deadline for sending them will be over, time will come to review them and pick the best 30!!! To help me review the applications, I will ask people (teachers, trainers etc) who have relevant work experience I it.

After selecting the best 30 applicants, I will conduct interviews with them, trying to see who they are, what they do, will they be committed to help develop their community, change the negative youth’s ideologies and urge young people to join us and start OUR ROAD TO CHANGES!!!!!!!

From 30 applicants, 15 best will be chosen, who eventually will form the Youth Group. Only after forming the group, I will be able to start my CAP and this is the way it is going to work.

As we need to plan our activities beforehand, defining our goals, assessing the risks associated with the CAP and finding ways to overcome the hindrances we may face in the future. So the group will meet 2 times a week to plan the activities and projects we will be doing. First we will look at the most serious issues our community is facing prioritize them and start working on each one of them separately. For example, if we see that Environment is a big issue in the community and people don’t know what to do about it, the group will assemble and start thinking of ways how to tackle down the problem. It may happen by organizing campaigns, initiating projects, raising people’s awareness about the bad consequences of not taking care of the Environment properly. We will also talk to community leaders, City Council, National Government and urging them to take the matter seriously and make them understand that youth is there to help in any situation (may it be Global Warming, HIV/AIDS etc.). Besides the most important thing for them to comprehend is that YOUTH is a valuable resource, they need to know how to “use” it apropos.

Well, this is just an example of what kind of activities and projects will be involved in my CAP, because there are variety of issues and programs my CAP will be dealing with, and as time passes by more projects we will launch and more young people we will recruit.

All in all, my CAP is about bringing young people into a group, work and orient them, and think about projects that will help other young people in the country to come on the right pass, to make difference and pass it on to others. I am also confident that in a year my CAP will start to include youth from different cities, and then from the whole country, thus preparing a strong and promising base for my countries future development.

In the end I would like to thank British Council and all GlobalChangemakers(Greenwich 07, Guildford 08, 09) for giving me this ones in a lifetime opportunity to start a new life with ideas and believes which will help me to make my country a better place for all Armenians. THANK YOU for your cooperation, advises, and helps. I am sure that without your help I won’t be able to do anything. Also thank you for giving me the opportunity to blog about my CAP and my future plans.

If you need more info about my CAP please let me know and I will be more than happy to provide you with it.

- Karapet, Global Changemaker from Armenia