By Sofia Pereira.
RIPESS recognises the will young people have been showing in the last years to change the world and how this is an opportunity to strengthen SSE within the new generations as well as it is an opportunity to present SSE as an added value path for the social changes needed in the coming years.
In this sense, in the last RIPESS EU General-Assembly, a working group on Youth and SSE was proposed and the participants received it with great enthusiasm. In the end of this interesting discussion, all participants agreed to unite efforts to create some concrete actions.
Since then, two online meetings were organised around concerns, possible actions and goals for this working group. The working group is currently divided in sub-working groups on: i) methodologies and structured sessions to present SSE to the young people, in schools for instance; ii) contact youth networks to join us in this initiative; iii) structured the working group goals.
On the second mentioned goal, and following RIPESS’ participation in the International Youth Conference, a meeting with Youth Alliance was held. Youth Alliance – Krusevo is an independent, non-governmental, non-political and non-profit organization founded in 1999. Their members (70-80 members) are young people between 15 and 35 who work, study or express their interest in the process of EU integration of our country. YAK is run by young people for young people, enabling a great experience for all of its stakeholders.
This was a very interesting meeting with an excellent atmosphere. The work that has been developed in the Youth and SSE working group was presented and Youth Alliance team talked about their interesting projects on social entrepreneurship and youth (namely through capacity-building) and how they want to get out of their comfort zone and contact different organisations from different locations and also address decision and policy-makers in the coming years.
To proceed with our work in the working group, we are promoting a brainstorm on concrete activities to develop the core goals of this group: advocacy, capacity-building, creation of opportunities and strategy.
We would like to invite everyone who is interested in this thematic – from any continent – to join us creating an international community connecting Youth and SSE.
