Post-TYA Reflection

As I wrap up another conference in a long consecutive string of conferences, I wanted to look back on my experience as a whole.

After my last conference (in 2009) I decided to call it quits. I had been invovled with the TYA organisation for two years and in that time had attended 3 conferences and a symposium and I had just gotten tired of the ordeal. I had been approached on numerous occasions asking if I was going to be the next conference and if I wanted to help run the conferece (serve as a deputy president) but I kept declining, citing one reason after the other always trying to steer away from or bend the truth that I just didn't want to come back, feeling that I would be ostracized for some sort of minor betrayal.

The reason why I didn't want to come back was very simple; I had been involved in 3 groups projects with lofy goals (each from a separate conference) and each one had crashed and burned either because of apathy of the partso of the students or the possibility of the task and I had had enough. The worst part of the projects was that I knew going it that most of these projects were logistically impossible which made it even harder to keep going back. With all that said, I did go back, of my own free will even.

Why, you may ask, would I return to the very conference that had frusterated so much of the last two years of my life? Well, the answer is very simple. I love it. Earlier this year, about the same time that I started shopping around for a winter term project, Emilie O'Herne, January's president contacted me changes in the format of the TYA 14 conference and I was immediately hooked. Instead of all the participants working on one project, they each were going to work on separate 'individual' projects where the incentive and focus wasn't so much on direct action, but on giving the youth actors the grassroots skills that are viable for creating and implementing a political project from scratch. Also, it was going to be heavily workshop based and would give a lot more time for discussion and speakers as opposed to computer driven research. Essentially, the new format changed everything that I hadn't liked about TYA to what I had originally though it should be.

Throughout the week though, my passion waxed and waned at one point almost snapped. There certainly were some moments in which I felt overwhelmed by everything that was going on or as if I just couldn't handle what was on my plate at the time. However, these times were very much in the minority and for the most part I had a blast. As I mentioned in the committee summary (which can be found here) our participants came from 9 countries and hugely diverse political and cultural backgrounds but sharing a common interest in the issues in Gender Issue. Because of this huge breadth of experience, the conference was amazing I really felt that I learned so much about all the cultures of the participants I had the privilege of working with. Truly just spending a week talking with someone from a very different walk of life (compared to yourself) is an eye-openning and deeply introspective experience — you learn a lot about them, but often times you learn even more about yourself.

At the end of it all, I would have to say I really enjoyed the conference. Especially when listening to my participants rave about how much they loved the conference, I really felt so accomplished and proud to have gotten my way through another tough week or little sleep, fewer breaks, non-stop politics. What I always find most satisfying about this conference though, and has a lot to do with the overarching reasons that I keep coming back to TYA and to Den Haag, where the conference is held is the very real chance I have to make a difference.

In the world of politics (international, national, regional, local) youth actors are making bigger and bigger waves and in these last few years especially they are truly becoming the most important driving force in the political arena. However, as true is this may be, the are still under appreciated and underutilized. The intensely patriarchal, ageist engine that is politics often sees the youth as nothing more than a non-voting, apathetic, moderately amusing demographic. They are naive in the eyes of the world and are self-interested and dependent solely on the older and wiser members of society to make decisions for them because they lack the knowledge or even interest to make them for themselves. This concept may have been true a couple of decades or maybe even the last generation of people to grow up but that is definitely not the case now and in my mind, that is what TYA is really all about; changing that one sided discourse into a dialogue, forcing people to talk with you and not at you. Making your voice heard by doing some sort of action be it giving a speech or holding a fundraiser is really quite easy and when I see young people's eyes light up when they realise this - that is what makes all the work (before and during the conference) worth it.

When the phrase "the sky's the limit" ceases being a trite idiom and becomes an axiom for life, that is when I feel as if I have succeeded and hearing all my participants chatter excitedly with one another during the last two days we had together about all their plans and how everything was going to work out really brought a smile to my face and a warmness to my heart and I knew that somewhere, no matter how small, I had made a difference, in someone's life that week.

Gender Issues: Committee Work

As was mentioned before, the final outcome of this week (for the participants) was the creation of a project proposal in the realm of Gender Issues in their community. In theory, what was then supposed to happen was the participants would then return back to their communities to implement the projects that they created to try to rectify or eliminate the problem that they were trying to address.

The following index contains the names of the participants and links to all of the project proposals that worked so hard to create:

"Fortunate to be Feminine" - Ayca Atabey, Miray Atesoglu, Ozge Armutcu
"'You're Beautiful' Awareness Campaign" - Kristin Kim, Pearl Kim
"Bridging the Gender Pay Gap in Cyprus" - Christina Papamichael, Evelyn Ioannou
"EMBRACElets" - Sarah Palazzolo
"Breaking through the Glass Ceiling (Het glazen plafond doorbreken)" -Vivian Wildeboer
"Freedom for Women (Freiheit fuer Frauen)" - Yannick Saive
"B-eat-it" - Naila Imad Eldin
"Respekt für harte Arbeit (respect for hard work)" - Christoph Schöneseiffen
'WiTHIN" - Ashton Ng Jing Kai

Gender Issues: Committee Summary

At the end of the conference every committee had to write a summary of all the week of the conference and what we did in our committee. We collaboratively came up with what should be contained within our summary and then I typed up the following piece that appeared in the 'end of conference' booklet.

At the beginning of this week, the Gender Issues committee convened - 15 strangers spanning 3 continents and 9 countries, by the end of the week left 15 friends, all citizens of a global community.

During the week the committee worked, discussing all manner of difficult issues found under the auspices of Gender Issues, ranging from the glass ceiling women face in the workplace to the rights of transgendered individuals. However, no matter where the discussion went or how tired everyone inevitably became, there was always a positive attitude and as unanimously voiced by the committee, a great sense of community.

One the of the best things about the Gender Issues committee at TYA 14 was its ability to balance hard work with play: diligently slaving away at their projects at one moment, always ahead of schedule, and having massive committee-wide photo shoots the next. This perfect balance of the formality of a conference and the informality of a group at ease with each other really fostered a the creation of friendships, so much so that one participant said that they felt we were all kind of “meant to meet together.”

With final projects going to be implemented for all walks of life – from an awareness campaign about the illegal sex trade in Germany to EMBRACElets, a fundraiser selling bracelets that serve as visual reminders of equality between all genders – every participant really poured themselves into their ideas. The entire committee is very excited about returning home beginning to work, some have even begun the second stages of their projects already.

With all the varied topics, ideas,and project that have been thrown around this week, it has been a whirlwind event for all involved. While some days the committee did seem to barely make it through the long intense days, they always came back and dedicated themselves all over again the next, truly a testament to their passion and stamina.

One purpose of TYA is to teach youth what it means to be an actor in the global community but another is to teach them what it means to be a human. In the words of the participants - we learned about more than just gender issues, we learned about foreign cultures and about our own.

DAY 5 (The Ending of TYA)

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Participant Reflections

On Thursday, we discussed the participants opinions about and the reactions to the conference, asking them each to say a few words. The following bullets were their reactions:

• I thought that all of our coordinators were really cool and didn't really tell us to get to work if we got distracted. It seemed that they knew when we needed a break and when we should be doing work.
  
  
• I really enjoyed the sense of community that developed amngst all of us, we worked together really well.
  
  
• I enjoyed the chance to work with everyone and I thought that we didn't really split into cliques but instead worked as a whole.
  
  
• I feel as if I have a much better understanding of all the different cultures that everyone was from. We have people from the United States from Singapore; from Turkey to Belgium and I feel as if I have a much more rounded view of the world now.
  
  
• I felt that the workshop discussions were really useful and I thought the variety of individual feedback that we got during the peer reviews was great, we really got to share our honest opinions on other people's projects.
  
  
• I felt that the conference was really fun but that we had some time where we weren't doing anything but waiting — I think that we could have accomplished the same amount of stuff with shorter days.
  
  
• The formalities and also the informalities of discussion were nice — the balance worked well.
  
  
• I think what was especially interesting was not only did we get to learn about other people's cultures, I think we really learned about our own cultures as well. We really got to examine the stereotypes and feelings inherent in our own societies.
  
  
• What I think I like best was that even if I don't end up finishing the project that I planned to do, i really learned “how-to-do-a-project” in the future.
  
  
• I liked the conference on the whole but I would have really liked more interaction with all of the other committees.
  
  
• I really was forced to think about issues that I never thought about before and the ones that I did know, I thougt about it different and new ways.
  
  
• I really appreciated that we not only learned about Gender Issues but that we really learned about a whole range of issues, some of which are related and some of which aren't.
  
  
• I really liked making all the new friends.
  
  
• I like how we got to take pictures as well as work really hard, both sides are really important and I like how both were expressed.
  
  
• In Singapore education is caged is really caged. At TYA, I really liked the cooperation, and the freedom to share ideas. This is truly the best form of education

DAY 4

Today was a relatively straight-forward day, in terms of what we planned to do and what we accomplished.

During the morning, we revisited some of the issues and concerns that were brought up during the day before (in the peer talk-back session) and after discussing different options that everyone had for their projects, the participants really dove back into their research and planning for another few hours, essentially trying to fill in the last remaining caps on the 'project proposal' forms that O'Herne (the TYA 14 president) had given them yesterday during her workshop and then formalize the entire document (typing it up, proofreading it, adding illustrations, etcetera)

When all of this was done and the documents were all submitted, we all met again to discuss what everyone, in the committee thought of the conference on a whole (a more detailed summary can be found here) in terms of the preparatory phase, the schedule, the workshops, the projects, and the general TYA management. As this weeks format was a very large change from all previous formats, it was really important that we got feed back as to what worked and was was not as successful.

Overall, everyone was really positive about the entire process and loved the conference; people especially loved the opportunities to meet so many new people from so many different cultures and backgrounds. One thing that was also brought up multiple times was that the participants especially enjoyed working with myself and my fellow coordinators because "unlike some of the other committees, we [myself and Mattia] really knew how to balance working hard and taking much needed breaks." There was one complaint that was shared across the committee though: people thought the days were too long because on some days, it seemed there was a lot of free time. I think, however, this was more due to the fact that everyone worked much harder and faster than we than we expected as we had never run the conference in this format before.

Finally, to end the day, we had our conference wide photo taken at the World Forum (where we met the first day for registration) which was a great because you got to see all sixty-odd people together at once and you really appreciated the magnitude of work that must have been done in the past few days. All-in-all, it was a nice moment to end the day with

DAY 3

Today, we started out the morning with a special speech by TYA 14's president, Emilie O'Herne addressing how the rest of the conference was structured and what is entailed by the projects that participants are supposed to do. Additionally, she gave a short speech on the subject of project management and risk analysis of projects - basically a checklist of common problems to look out for. Basically, the point of her speech was to give the participants all the tools that they needed to be thinking about in order to have a successful project and because they all understood this it was very well received. The only complaint that I heard about the speech is that people had really wished it had come earlier in the week (at least the points about what the project was) because they had been slightly confused for the first two days.

Irregardless, armed with a wide array of new knowledge all my participants really dove straight into their projects as soon as the speech was over – most choosing to remain working as individuals, while a few who happened to be at the same school decided to combine their smaller projects into a big campaign.

For the most part, this is what the participants worked on for the rest of the day, only stopping for a short speech by one of the deputy presidents Akua Nyame-Mensah about sponsorship and TYN and the quais-requisite mid-afternoon photo shoot*. Nyame-Mesah's speech was focused on how to ask organisations for money and what to do for in order to get funding; like O'Herne's speech in the morning, its intention to supply the participants with yet more tools to help them create and implement their projects. Additionally, Nyame-Mesah also talked about the TYN (THIMUN Youth Network) and what you could do after this conference, and outside of it; the potential to join international delegations to proper United Nations conferences such as the UNCSD in New York, or the World Water Forum, which was last held in Istanbul. Both of things really grabbed the attention of the participants and even though their attention span was beginning to waver, I think they found both parts of the speech really useful.
*On the note of the photos, it was actually really amusing to watch — one person who basically start staring off into space and within minutes another person would join them, then another, then another, until the entire committee was completely distracted and out would come the cameras. This would then go on for a few minutes but the participants would always go back to work immediately as soon as their 'break' was done.

About an hour before the end of the day, when it seemed that most of the participants had self-proclaimed themselves 'finished' with their projects, we came back together for a peer review session. Very similar to the presentation/discussion we had the day before about people's research, the basic structure was one individual would give a short description of their project and maybe some background and then everyone was invited to give comments or questions on what they thought it, specifically focused on the feasibility of the project and its potential risks. Once we had then gone around the entire committee and discussed all the projects, the participants then split back up and continued working on their projects using the new ideas that they had gotten from the review.

Finally, today ended a bit early because we it was the middle of the week, the 'slump' so to speak and the school that was housing our conference DiSDH (Deutsche Internationale Schule Den Haag) wanted a picture of all of us so we all had to file out onto the stairs and pose for the cameras.

I have always that Wednesdays are always the hardest days during conferences like these. Often times people have lost their initial excitement but have yet to gain the "it's-almost-over-must-savour-it" kick and so they tend to be particularly low energy. Also, it is usually at this point that the stress, wear, and tear begins to appear in the participants which can be equally hard to deal with. All that being said, I think all of my participants performed admirably; it was long, tedious, and some parts downright boring, but they humoured me and stuck with it 'till the end. In short, they are the best committee I have ever had.