ENGAGING YOUTH

Centre for Intercultural Dialogue

Youth Capacity Building

To support the development of leadership skills among youth.

The Centre for Intercultural Dialogue (CID) has developed a program called CID Academy for Young Leaders, which aims to develop skills to support young people in becoming leaders of society. The CID hosted a main training, and then a series of 16 one-day trainings on a variety of different topics ranging from facilitation, to conflict management, to writing skills.

This initiative was successful in engaging youth and achieving advocacy outcomes because it viewed youth participation as a process rather than as an end. CID used an approach similar to the engagement scale presented. The Center first provided training to participants and then fostered further engagement by encouraging collaboration among participants and supporting the ongoing advocacy efforts of the youth participants. In addition, the capacity building opportunities provided enabled them to effectively engage stakeholders and decision-makers on these youth-related issues. These opportunities allowed the participants to become increasingly engaged and achieve impactful outcomes, which would also encourage their continued participation.

Further information of this strategy can be found here:

During the training sessions, participants got to know each other and created advocacy initiatives based on the needs of young people in their local context. One of these advocacy initiatives involved creating high school unions, through which they hosted seven debates in different high schools in their city. After these debates they hosted an open dialogue at city council, where they presented the results from the debates and underscored the need to create a common working group to unify all the high school unions.