CAPs Friday (10/2)

Many people have asked us what Strawberry Generation is. Trust us, Strawberry Generation is not as sweet as it sounds. Strawberry Generation is a notorious term used significantly in the late ’80s in Asia to describe fragile youths today who easily succumb to pressure. We are exactly doing this project to combat that. In Asia, and this applies to every corner in the world, we face different youth work problems, yet there is a mutual, persistent issue that all of us face as youth – there is a huge gap and a lack of opportunities where youth can take part in. Strawberry Generation? Call us Changemakers! envisions to address that persistent issue as well as to bridge the gap so that we can live in an empowered community.

Strawberry Generation? Call us Changemakers! currently runs in Burma, Canada, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea holding various talks, photo exhibits, postcard project, feature stories and local project visits.

Presentations were given in various educational institutions including secondary school, colleges and youth clubs. The presentations aimed to enlighten, empower and engage the youths in the field of changemaking through informing them of opportunities given by programs such as the Global Changemakers network. Our audience capacity reached a total of 957 youths through the various talks.  Break –up wise we had 415 in Myanmar, 250 in Papua New Guinea, 170 in Malaysia and 122 in Canada. The attendees found the presentations an eye-opener to the many prevailing issues around the globe. Simultaneously, they were fascinated and inspired by the work of the global changemakers. Many subsequently joined action events organized under this project to make real changes in their society.

In Myanmar, 73 volunteers had come together to provide aid for the needy. A fundraising activity for 1200 fire victims as well as projects befriending the elderly and orphans were organized.

In Malaysia, 48 volunteers had committed themselves in projects benefiting the less-privileged children.  These included a bowling outing with 20 Down Syndrome children and a mentoring programme for 30 children staying in a welfare home.

In Canada, students will participate community work in the area of environment, youth work and poverty and hunger relief in this coming February.

In Papua New Guinea, our very own Global Changemaker, Jacqui will lead the students of Port Moresby National High School to carry out projects that are aimed at improving the school and the community.

It was the very first time volunteering for some of the volunteers, and it was amazing to see that this project sparked their interest in the field of community work. Many promised to continue engaging in the community events.

There are two innovative initiatives of the project, postcard activity and feature stories on Facebook. In the case of former activity, we printed 3 versions of postcard which features various issues of women empowerment, youth empowerment and social entrepreneurship. Each version of postcard contains the photos of project’s activities, a brief description of a Global Changemaker and his or her inspired story of community works. Most importantly, we also included the Global Changemaker website address on the postcard which we believe would  act as a invitation to youths around the world to be a part of the Global Changemaker family. Moreover, the printed postcards were not sold, but distributed to youths as a compliment after presentations so that they in turn can spread the activism of Changemakers to their peers and pen-pals across the globe. This postcard activity is really effective even for the youth who live in the countries where internet usage is very low.

The latter activity is a web-based activity wherein we used a social network (Facebook) to empower youth to be involved in community services. The major part of this activity was sharing the community projects of Changemakers as feature stories. We uploaded stories that focused on different community initiatives by respective global changemakers biweekly and also shared information about youth events such as Malaysian Young Changemakers.

From the feature stories we anticipated that through these feature stories youths would be motivated with  ideas to help their local community and also link up  with other like-minded youths around the world through our Facebook page. Moreover, Strawberry Generation? Call us Changemakers! page on facebook provides a forum for  youth to share and discuss their ideas and experiences of implementing projects.

Both activities aim to give more awareness about real needs of respective local community and world-wide youth-led community projects. Furthermore, we can use avenues such as these to inform youth to know that they have rights to do community works freely in.

All in all youth activism is on the rise, however within the developed and developing countries youth activism differs according to the amount of exposure and support that youths have been given in their plight to see a change in their respective communities. It is our aim that through this regional action project youths in Canada, Malaysia, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea will be more aware of the important role that youth play in the development or their country and most effectively bring in the positive social change they want to see in their communities.

Strawberry Generation? Call us Changemakers! comes into focus to empower youths to be involved in change making rather than just sitting around and waiting for change to happen. More so with various activities that we have organised it is our aim that these activities may extend out to our wider communities and ideally the international community. Our hopes for this project are numerous however we want to see purposeful generations of youth who can drive the change their community needs and bring about the change the world needs.

We invite you to join us as anti-Strawberry Generation warriors!

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Strawberry-Generation-Call-us-Changemakers/175447275863771

Page project at Global Changemakers website: http://www.global-changemakers.net/projects/strawberry-generation-call-us-changemakers/

- Xi (Malaysia), Jacqui (Papua New Guinea), Zin and Min Zai (Burma) and Disty (Canada)