My first day at the ten-year review of the World Programme of Action for Youth at the UN Headquarters in New York and I’m actually surprised that I find the time and energy to write down some impressions of this long day.

I arrived at the UN at 10am this morning to set up our MDG traveling arts exhibition. After just 30 minutes I had to make a terrible encounter: Somebody had stolen our guestbook :-( I was so disappointed about this and honestly couldn’t believe how rude people are to steal something in the UN building. You would assume that the people walking around in this building are all just honest diplomats working for the UN itself or national governments. But no… I just hope that nobody is going to steal some of the artwork as well. I don’t want to go home with empty hands after this one week.

As I had to set up the exhibition, I was too late to attend the opening plenary this morning, so I decided to work a bit afterwards and I had a good conversation with the representatives of the European Youth Forum, with whom we are going to organize a side-event this Friday on “Strengthening youth participation in decision-making”.

During the lunch break I attended the side-event organized by ICMYO (the International Coordination Meeting of Youth Organizations) on “Global and Regional Youth – Experiences with the WPAY”. There were two speakers from UN agencies at the event (a person from the Youth Employment Network of the ILO and a representative of UNICEF). The other people were speakers from the European Youth Forum, the World Organization of the Scout Movement, the International Movement of Catholic Students (Pax Romana) and the World Alliance of YMCAs. Two things that I found interesting at the event and that I would like to share here:
1.) The ILO is sending out a call to all youth organizations this week to submit them case studies of how youth organizations on a local level are addressing the problem of youth unemployment. ILO wants to collect about 20-30 best practices that they will compile in a report. I thought this is a really good opportunity for young people (especially those involved in YES country networks) to highlight and get some recognition for their projects. So if you are working on youth employment, please watch out the ILO/YEN website this week!
2.) The representative from the Scouts was talking about their HIV/AIDS program and I was actually quite impressed by the work they are doing on the ground. One example that I really liked was, that the Scouts are giving out red ribbons, which Scouts can put on their uniforms after successfully completing a training course on HIV/AIDS. The red ribbon also entitles the Scouts who receive it to train other young people themselves afterwards. I think this is a great way of promoting these training/education courses as well as peer-to-education. Maybe something for other organizations to copy (even TIG ourselves)? I honestly believe that giving out “certificates” or similar objects of recognition is a great way of getting young people involved in something…

After the side-event I had a quick lunch and then planned on attending the official session of the Third Committee (where youth issues are being discussed), but to my surprised, when I went there around 4pm, nobody was left in the room (the meeting was supposed to go from 3-6pm). In the hallway, I met a very disappointed Joop (head of the UN Youth Program) who told me that there hadn’t been any more speakers, so the meeting had closed early. You could really see the frustration in his face about how little member states apparently cared about youth policies… It was indeed a shame.

In the end, I spent the rest of my afternoon talking to Leif Holmberg (from the European Youth Forum). We had a very fruitful conversation in my opinion about global youth politics and the structures of youth participation.

In the evening we headed to a movie screening that the UN Youth Program had organized and to my surprise I just entered the room when Julie introduced the WSIS video that TIG had produced! It was so great to see – many of the youth reps were there and I was really happy that they had decided to show it (although I was not too happy about the fact that she chose exactly the part of the movie where I’m speaking on the National Information Society Youth Campaigns…). In fact, Julie came to me after the meeting and almost apologized for showing the video without asking TIG before for permission – but really, what should we have against it? This is what the video was made for and I was really excited to see it shown at the UN.
They also showed another excellent video that the Australian Youth Delegate from last year had produced about her work as youth delegate – it was very inspiring to see and demonstrated me again how many more such videos we need in order to get the message across that youth can meaningfully contribute to decision-making processes!

What followed was a really interesting discussion about the work of the youth delegates and now I’m waiting for all of them to finally leave the UN building and have a beer to end this first day full of events, debates and interesting conversations about the future of youth participation…

More from the WPAY review soon…