One of the things I love about my job is getting to meet young people from around the world who are working to make their communities better places to live. This week in Moscow, I got to do just that at IREX's Youth Initiatives in Action Conference, which brought together over 100 youth leaders, adult mentors and government and NGO representatives from across Russia to celebrate the achievements of the past three years of the Youth Development Competencies Program [13], share best practices, and brainstorm ways to further strengthen youth programs and policy in their home regions.
Youth activism, community service and student government are still developing in Russia. While American high school students are encouraged to be “well-rounded” and participate in a slew of extracurriculars to be competitive in college admissions, most Russian universities make their decisions based on exam scores and grades. Russian schools tend to focus on academic achievement, and rates of both youth and adult volunteerism are low compared to in the West. Especially in smaller towns and villages, there are few extracurricular outlets, and youth are rarely engaged in community improvement projects.
While studying is important, there's a lot you can't learn in the classroom. An important personal experience for me in high school was organizing a charity benefit concert with other students. We didn't turn a huge profit, but that didn't really matter. Together, we'd tasted the thrill of making our idea a reality and gained confidence in our abilities, which inspired us to keep coming up with new projects.
Katya, a conference participant and high school student from an isolated, underserved community in Russia's far north, has also discovered she and her peers can make an impact. Through YDCP, they learned project design and management skills and received support to implement their own community improvement ideas.
When I asked Katya what she likes best about her town, Kandalaksha, she answered without hesitation, “I like that it's getting better, cleaner! Through this project we improved a lot of places in our town – we built a playground and a little hut in the woods [near our school] where you can sit and enjoy nature. It's not dirty there anymore. Kids built it ourselves.” Her next idea for a project is to form a theater troupe in Kandalaksha that performs plays on social issues – a model currently implemented by YDCP participants who traveled to the conference from Chelyabinsk. Young people like Katya are an amazing asset to their communities – and also serve as role models that will engage other youth in civic initiatives. “I think younger kids look at our work and maybe they'll want to do it themselves – they'll develop and implement their ideas for projects of their own,” she said.
“There used to be nothing for youth in this town, but now there is.”