I’m sitting at Newark airport, waiting for my flight back to Toronto, which is 2 hours delayed – a good moment to sit down and write a last update about the events at the UN this week.

Thursday saw the General Assembly review of the World Programme of Action for Youth. There were quite a few really good speeches from youth delegates. My favorite two were from Erik, the Dutch Youth Delegate (no wonder, as Ben and I have been helping him edit his speech :-P) and Victoria, the Norwegian Youth Delegate. Erik focused his speech on youth unemployment and Victoria, who is a refugee from Rwanda, on the rights of young immigrants – because of her personal background, it was probably the most touching speech of all.

There were also quite a few disappointing speeches though. The Canadian one, to name just one example, sounded more like a speech written by the Canadian government, rather than a youth speech. A lot of people were also missing the passion and vision that I would youth delegates expect to have. But in general it was good to see so many young people speak at such a high-level forum.

On Friday, we did the last preparations for our side-event on “Strengthening youth participation in decision-making”. The event was in my opinion a great success. We first had Renaldas and Joao from the European Youth Forum speak about the EYF and National Youth Councils, and more concretely the co-management system as an excellent example of youth participation on a national and regional level. After that I talked about the World Summit on the Information Society Youth Caucus (and of course showed parts of our movie) and Jen added to it by talking more broadly about how ICTs enable youth participation in decision-making (using the Youth Caucus as an example). I also officially launched the revamp of our VOICE section.
The third case study of successful youth participation in decision-making was presented by Leif from the EYF, who talked about the CSD Youth Caucus. Originally we had invited Emily to talk about the ad-hoc working group on Youth and the MDGs, which came out of the CSD Youth Caucus, but unfortunately, she couldn’t join us and so I took on her part as well. Lastly, Erik and Hanna, the Swedish Youth Delegate, talked about their role as Youth Delegates and how they were selected.

I believe we had a great and inspiring program, outlining many different ways of how youth can effectively influence decision-making on various levels. Joop, the head of the UN Youth Program, was there to make a few closing remarks and he used the chance to look back at the week and reflect about what was good and what could have been better. I think, one outstanding remark that many of us had observed and critiqued ourselves, was the absence of adults. It almost seemed as all the countries, which had sent youth delegates, were now thinking: well, if we have our youth at the events, then we don’t need to go there anymore ourselves. But of course, if this is what is happening, then we don’t need youth delegates. If at the end, young people are sitting in the UN General Assembly, presenting great speeches but ending up talking again just to each other – then, what is the purpose of this exercise? Young people need a place in government delegations to the GA, so that they can raise their voice and tell these governments why youth participation is important and how they can work together with young people for a better future of their countries.

The week ended with many of us going Salsa dancing to a club in Lower East Side. It was a fantastic evening and indeed a grand finale of a very productive week for me.

The picture shows me and Jen in the General Assembly hall. For more pictures of the week, pleas have a look at my online photo album.