Upshift: Youth at the forefront of change in Montenegro
Innovation Lab Creactivator
- Available in:
- Crnogorski
- English
ULCINJ, MONTENEGRO, 12 June, 2016 – A group of young people from the north of Montenegro selected issues they find important in their local communities and worked on finding solutions for them during the three-day Upshift workshop in Ulcinj.
Ten teams whose ideas were selected joined forces with ten mentors and staff from the Creactivator, Innovation Lab running these workshops, in order to identify innovative solutions for local problems. Young people learned the techniques and methods of the problem-solving process by going through it step by step.
Vladimir Fatic, a high school student from Plav, said he applied for the workshop, because he wanted to provide young people from different cultural backgrounds with more opportunities to be friends and spend time together.
We identified the lack of socialization among youth from different cultural backgrounds as the problem we wanted to deal with. Albanians, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Serbs live together in this community and we think they do not socialize enough. We want to change that
Anela Džemajlović, a high school student also from Plav, regrets that there are not enough extracurricular activities.
Young people need to travel to other cities if they want to go to a concert or a sports event. Sports clubs are not active. They are especially unavailable to females. To attend a music school young people have to travel to other cities at their own expense, even though the state should be covering this.
To solve these problems, young people want to found a youth club in Plav.
Belma Kalac, a high school student from Rozaje, wants to make her town more inclusive.
I signed up for Upshift to solve, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems of our society and our local community - the inaccessibility of schools for young people with disabilities.
This is the second Upshift workshop, which is organized in our country by the Innovation Lab Creactivator, launched by UNICEF, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Directorate of Youth and Sports and NGO Digitalizuj.me, with financial support from ING.