Third Youth and Children’s Municipalities Summer Camp
“We are the present, not the future” Santo Domingo.- In a rigorous programme of activities, training and recreation for children who make up the Municipal Youth Councils in the municipalities of Azua, Baní, Constanza, La Romana, Guaymate, San José de Ocoa Villa Altagracia, Villa González and Yaguate spent three days sharing experiences, values and knowledge during their Third National Summer Camp. Eighty-five members of the new councils and 18 ex-members took part in the Bayaguana “Campventure”, with the aim of acquiring basic skills that will enable them to contribute to finding solutions to the main problems affecting children in their communities. They followed a programme of activities with sessions on leadership and participatory democracy, children’s rights, emergencies, communications and project implementation. Fonsy Mejia, Participation Coordinator for World Vision in the Dominican Republic, facilitated a session on Children and Youth participation in their municipalities. Participants said that “in order to demand we have to know first” while others said that “the main right is the right to life”. In order to guide children and adolescents on how to prepare a community project, Eric Mercedes, facilitator for Team Work and Project Management, presented a simple format for formulating projects. He started the session with dynamic ice-breakers that promote union and team work, shared materials which showed examples of a good plan, the steps needed for developing a good project, planning techniques and strategies, as well as clarifying doubts. They spent several hours setting up working groups to develop and present projects. The teams displayed their organisational and teamwork skills, and at the end values like leadership, honesty, organisation, enthusiasm and will stood out in the teams.
The Communications Workshop was an activity full of enthusiasm and creativity that dominated the summer camp. Children and adolescents displayed skills and abilities to support each other and deal with the communications media. UNICEF’s Social Marketing consultant Fernando Salazar facilitated this session and motivated them to work on three news items with specific and very topical issues, and to present a communications proposal: the lack of Birth Certificates, Commercial Sexual Exploitation/Child Abuse and Education. In their proposals, most of the groups focused on using mass communications media like news and interview programmes. They also showed their creativity as several groups chose role-play to convey their messages. They involved the mayors and the youth and children’s municipalities from each municipality in order to establish a “fictitious” dialogue between the “responsible” and the “guilty” parties in the problem. One group used a very complete situation analysis. Another proposal was to create a media strategy so that the children could lead radio and television programmes on the premise that “children understand children best, so let’s use all the media outlets to reach all the children in the country” and so communicate with all children in every municipality. In the end, all displayed innate communications skills. Many of the participants looked forward eagerly to the session on Emergencies and the Riesgolandia game, while others were curious to find out what it was all about. It is a flexible and enjoyable game that projects messages about disaster prevention practices aimed at helping reduce the communities’ vulnerabilities. The third summer camp was a space for learning and motivation for the new council members of the Children’s and Youth Municipalities, and for the ex-members it was the ideal place to share their experiences and this is precisely what they suggested: to go on supporting the initiative and setting up the Advisors’ Network, an initiative that has proved to be very valuable. The outgoing members valued their capacity for promoting the youth and children’s municipalities, the training they have received and the experiences in participation processes, such as the National Consultation Process for Constitutional Reform. They are willing to continue working for children and declare that, “we are the present, not the future”. Sarah Carrasco
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