Last weekend (25-26 October) a group of enthusiastic young people from Kriva Palanka decided to spend the end of the week productively and gathered for a training on active participation and advocacy campaigns. This is yet another training on “How to make advocacy campaigns” provided by the Center for Intercultural Dialogue (CID) in the North-Eastern region of Macedonia, in partnership with the National Youth Council of Macedonia (NYCM).
During two days, CID’s trainers Milos Ristovski and Matej Manevski discussed with the youth of Kriva Palanka the problems that young people face in their community. They did a mapping of the city, brainstorming on what activities would be welcomed by the youth. Planning the activities and coming up with clear objectives for future action stirred a passionate discussion among the participants, since everybody wanted their plan to be successful and genuinely reach the youth in their community.
The ladder of youth voice, the tree of problems, the design of an advocacy campaign were all steps undertaken by the participants in order to understand how a campaign works and what they need to make it happen. The dynamic of the group was so good that they decided to stay after the training ended to keep working on their action plan.
Everybody agreed that it was a satisfying way to spend the weekend and exactly what young people in Kriva Palanka are lacking. „This is a great chance to initiate something important in Kriva Palanka and we are greatful to CID for having this initiative. We want to attract more youth and to build the capacities needed for empowering the civil society in our country. The trainers guided us through the entire process and shared their experience in order to help us make our proposals as efficient as possible”, shares Klementina, one of the participants. Elena told us that she enjoyed bonding with the others and strengthening friendships while caring about the future of the young generation in their community: „Now we have the chance to give the young people who complain about the lack of possibilities what they want, and we are taking it in order to wake people up”.