Life after Herrsching

Thank you YPARD! - Action Plans and new skills for the future

By Johanna Gysin and Martina Graf

The last week of the 26^th International Leadership Workshop for Rural Youth has been coined by a very busy and highly concentrated atmosphere among the participants and facilitators of the seminar. In the first week we learnt all about team building, about motivation and presentation. In the second week we approached rural youth work with a collection of best practices from the different organizations and a session on problems encountered. And now in the end it comes to action!

During the last days of the workshop the centrepiece of the workshop has been worked on: each participant elaborated a concrete action plan with the idea to implement it into reality when back home. The requirement for planned actions were: be as concrete as possible, answer questions on financing, description and number of staff involved, the timeframe and definition of the indicators to measure the success.

The most important point was that every participant has to REALLY achieve something with the help of the action plan. And for once the emphasis was not on developing highly elaborated projects for whole regions but rather simple, feasible actions, which everybody of us will realize in our home countries. In order to not only create another paper tiger, each participant got an assigned “Buddy”, a person that will ask about the action plan and its realization after some time has passed. The Buddy will ask for an exchange of the experiences of the action plan and motivate to go on.

The outcomes of the workshop have been as diverse and interesting, as the participants of the Seminar were. While some work on capacity building in the IT field, others plan to organize marketing activities for remote living artisans or organize international meetings for interest groups to exchange and share experiences. E.g. there is a project on building a community play ground for children in a poor area of urban Colombia and another one, which aims at building a centre to improve living condition of women in Moundou region of Chad.

All participating YPARD members were actively discussing ideas how to get YPARD activated in their countries and developed concrete action plans therefore. It was a great chance to be at the same place, having YPARDians around to exchange experience and also agree about collaborations between the countries. Another great success was demonstrated, when even participants from other organizations began to integrate YPARD in their action plans.

As diverse as the topics have been, the presentations of the participants at the end of the week were. Each language group selected an action plan to present and elaborated together a presentation of the results. There has been an interesting theatre illustrating the marketing project of the Jadupur region in India, where artisans need better marketing possibilities for their quality products; a prezi-presentation (www.prezi.com)  informed well-structured on how to increase the volume and outreach of a local saving group in Cambodia. Another presentation was held on the development possibilities of a young farmers’ association in Kansas, USA. And again YPARD got the chance to rock the floor: YPARD Europe explained in a simple and clear PowerPoint presentation the aim of organizing the 1^st YPARD-conference for the European countries representatives.

Besides these projects, several other have been presented. The presentations and posters showed, in how many fields the participants of the 26^th International Leadership Workshop for Rural Youth are actively engaging themselves. It was highly inspiring to see so much potential and motivation to improve and change the situation of the youth in rural areas all around the world. We wish all the participants of the workshop success and rewarding experiences with their personal projects!

Hopefully in two years the 27^th International Leadership Workshop for Rural Youth will be held again, with YPARDians contributing and spreading the word!