Imagining the Green future: Environmental strategy and Youth advocacy
Why do we need to imagine the green future?
The world is facing an unprecedented environmental crisis. In response, young people across the world call for climate justice as they are expressing their concerns and demands in non-violent protests, campaigns, and direct actions. They do so as individuals, but also connected to other young people by joining different organisations or forming informal action groups and movements. These groups then mobilise themselves to develop and implement a specific campaign, project or any other action. Usually, these tend to be one-time events that aim to achieve a specific goal. However, after one such an event takes place people often part ways, regardless if it succeeds or not.
Now it’s time to change it and ensure a long impact of youth environmental organisations and movements!
At YEE, we believe that the scale of the environmental crisis we are currently facing demands a rapid and better structured response which will actually involve young leaders not just as a token. The voice of young people and the future generation has to be better recognized and involved in the current and future developments of both climate action and environmental decision-making at all levels. Young engaged citizens and activists are the change-makers and they should feel like the change-makers.
That’s why we want to support them with building more structured and sustainable youth environmental organisations of the future through our project “Imagining the Green Future: Environmental Strategy and Youth Advocacy”.
What came before?
Our work plan in 2018 was focused on environmental decision-making and youth participation. In 2019, we were focusing on the topic of grassroots, bottom-up initiatives and young people who want to solve concrete environmental problems and issues in their local communities. Now, we would like to build up on the identified needs from both projects and focus on capacity building for young people, to actively engage in local level policy making, with a strong background and support coming from a structured and sustainable organisation.
What are the aim and objectives?
Aim of this project is to contribute to the sustainability of the activities and structure of environmental youth movements, informal groups and organisations to ensure young people’s access to participation in policy making processes. We want to develop strategies for youth workers, environmental activists, informal environmental youth groups and environmental youth organisations to build up an organisational structures from one time activities, grassroots movements to achieve long-term impact on environmental policies and influencing local policy making through participation in political structures by campaigning and advocacy.
Objectives of the project:
- Vision Building – to support youth to create a sustainable vision and structure for entering political environment;
- Advocacy for environment – to develop competences of youth workers and informal groups of young people needed to advocate, campaign and lobby for environmental policies on local level;
- To support and empower local groups to influence local environmental policies through advocacy, campaigning and lobbying;
- To create a space for exchanging good practices and learning from each other among youth engaged citizens, activists, youth workers, youth movements and informal groups of young people.
What are the activities?
The project is composed of international training courses followed by local actions.
Online Training: Building the Vision I.
With this activity, we have successfully kicked off the topic of vision building for youth environmental organisations that we will further explore with our follow-up activities. During the online training course, we have successfully prepared 25 young people from all over the world coming from environmental movements, informal groups and non-governmental organisations to (re)think of (re)establishing their organisational structures and (re)defining their vision, mission, values, organisational aims, and objectives.
Our online interactive training course was based on non-formal education and experiential learning methods. We have focused on the necessity of different organisational aspects such as membership management and fundraising. We believe that this online training provided the participants and their organisations with the right base before diving into advocacy and political lobbying on local, regional, national, and international levels.
Online Training course “Building the Vision: Youth environmental organisations of the future”
29 January – 07 February 2021
The week-long online training course enabled participants to dig deeper into the topics of vision building and organisational management. Together with 28 ambitious young people from all over the world we discussed the topics of Vision Building, NGO Foundational Structures, Fundraising & Crowdfunding, and NGO & Membership Management. We will build-upon the questions arising from the online training course and move further into building a strong and sustainable youth environmental organisations of the future.Our online interactive training course was based on non-formal education and experiential learning methods. We have focused on the necessity of different organisational aspects such as mission & vision statements, aims and objectives, as well as membership management and fundraising. We believe that this online training provided the participants and their organisations with the right base before diving into advocacy and political lobbying at all levels.
Training course - “Advocates for a Green Future”
12 – 18 April 2021 This training course brought together young leaders, volunteers, and youth workers from environmental movements, informal groups, and organisations wishing to revise their structure or strengthen their impact of work on environmental policies and policymaking.
Trainers and experts, together with the project team designed a programme focused on developing skills that are needed to get engaged within political processes – how to do advocacy and lobbying, how to design and implement a successful online campaign, how to communicate with different stakeholders, and how to mobilise communities to join environmental projects.
Local projects - “Step up and stand up!”
May 2021 The final activity consisted of various local projects organised by participants of the training courses and member’s organisations.
The 7 selected applicants received funds to organise their local projects with young people, to create a basis for their future organisation and start working on environmental issues through political processes on a local level. They were not only able to practice the skills obtained during the training courses, but also to raise the environmental awareness and empower young people in their communities.
During May 2021 we supported 7 climate local actions across Europe:
- “Climate is changing, and you?” – Educational workshop for youth in the nature in Serbia (Young Researchers of Serbia)
- “World Biodiversity Day Clean Up action” Beach clean-up action on the World Biodiversity Day in Bari, Italy (MOH Italy)
- “Ecolution” Environmental youth training in Armenia (YDC Armenia/ Volunteam)
- “Separating waste for the green future – Umbrella” Environmental and waste management youth workshops and clean-up action in Georgia (Umbrella)
- “Together Against Food Waste” Online campaign & cooking workshop preventing the food waste in Copenhagen, Denmark (UN Youth Association of Denmark)
- “Discussion on Silesia’s Region Just Transition” Online conferences & campaign on transition from coal in Poland (BioMiasto / Młodzi Dla Klimatu)
- “PLAYing our part on change” Online youth capacity building workshops in Italy (Eufemia)
YEE aims to unite environmental youth non-profit organisations in Europe in order to enhance international cooperation, increase knowledge about the climate crisis, raise awareness of environmental problems and to strengthen participation of youth in environmental decision-making.
