Road traffic injuries have been the leading killer of young people worldwide for over a decade and are often tokenized without meaningful engagement. How can NGOs involve and empower youth in building programs that also improve the lives of youth? At YOURS, we strongly believe in empowering young people to advocate for road safety and sustainable mobility solutions.
Alliance Live Sessions
Alliance Live Sessions are expert-led panel discussions exploring issues outside but connected to road safety. Each session will look at a particular theme, through the lens of COVID-19 and the lessons that we can take from the current pandemic, plus how road safety NGOs can work with other activists from different SDGs to bring their causes together with a unified voice.
23 June 2020 3pm CEST/9am EDT Road traffic injuries have been the leading killer of young people worldwide for over a decade and are often tokenized without meaningful engagement. How can NGOs involve and empower youth in building programs that also improve the lives of youth?
About the session
There are multiple reasons to justify youth involvement, but the key ones are:
- Enables the exercise of citizenship: holding governments and donor agencies to account. Exercise of citizenship rights and duties in youth are durable and often determine political participation later in adulthood. Participation promotes learning, empowerment and greater control over lives, which enables a wide range of voices to be heard.
- Makes policies and services relevant for youth: building young people’s commitment and ownership to the solutions to issues they face.
- Makes the SDGs a reality: contributing to solve the world’s greatest challenges, whether that means leading a grassroots movement with tangible and concrete local actions or advocating and campaigning globally on the most pressing issues for them, such as road traffic injuries, climate change, poverty, gender equality, education and human rights.
Young people, with unique skills and perspectives in today’s ever-evolving world, are at the forefront of communication, technology, innovation, and change but not necessarily subject to the reality they face in terms of road safety and other related issues. It is crucial to invite young people to meaningfully participate to not only empower them in the situation but to involve them in creating programs and solutions that are addressing the realities of youth themselves.
Live Session’s description and objectives
The session intends to connect youth, communicating its concerns and aspirations to the Global Alliance members. It will be a virtual space where youth leaders will share their experiences, thoughts and needs from the lens of different fields of expertise beyond road safety. At the end of the session, one might find out that even though our goals are different, we share common strategies.
Objectives:
By the end of the live session participants will:
- Be able to understand how and why youth participation and leadership is valuable in the decision-making process within many organizations’ structures, based on young leaders’ experience and knowledge and how to involve them in their organizations;
- Identify key outcomes from a discussion with young leaders who are actively engaged with different issues that matter to youth; find the linkage with road safety and safe mobility;
- Be inspired to engage youth in meaningful and effective ways in their organizations and to design mobility and road safety projects that address youth issues;
- Have some practical ideas that will improve their engagement with youth and youth issues.