Youth4Switzerland
The past years have shown that young people are speaking up about issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss, calling for global leaders to make an effort in implementing the United Nations Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. By initiating the Youth4Switzerland project, collaboratio helvetica, together with numerous partner organisations, wants to provide the space to identify the needs of young people working in the sustainability field and facilitate the co-creation of a process/project to address those needs.Through our unique action research methodologies, we apply, organise and facilitate; stakeholder interviews, street interviews, movie roundtable discussions, dialogue nights, workshops and capacity building retreats. Throughout our activities, we create a safe container for deep listening that enables the co-creation of transformative solutions to the wicked challenges of our times.
Our approach
We create grassroot understandings of where we stand today as youth and youth organisations. Accommodating the perspectives of young people, we explore the ambiguity and the potential present as we co-create emancipatory dialogue across sectors, cantons and generations on sustainability and systems change.
The Swiss youth organisations and networks do great work in engaging young people and empowering them with the skills, attitudes and knowledge needed to succeed in following their dreams and in creating value for society. Increasingly, youth are also vocal about priorities and issues that are crucial for the future, and calling for systems change. It has become clear that a deeper shift needs to occur, on the level of the paradigms on the basis of which our entire society is organised.
Interviews and co-creation sessions have highlighted the following needs: young people working on the SDGs want to be better connected to different stakeholders, their voices to be heard and to build more capacity to broaden the impact of their work (especially on the systemic level).
Different skills and partnerships are needed to bring about this systemic change, and it is imperative that young leaders possess them to reach their goals. Further, youth representation in institutions across Switzerland often remains tokenistic, without real engagement possibilities. Youth has proved (e.g. with the Fridays for Future movement) that it can and should play a bigger role in leading the dialogue for our future. It is time to catalyse systemic change towards meaningful youth engagement in sustainability in Switzerland.
Street interviews
As part of our research and mapping activity of the ecosystem around the youth sector working towards the SDGs, we conducted a series of street interviews throughout Switzerland. Take a look!
“With the Youth4Switzerland we will open an innovative space for young people to explore their collaborative potential as well as their talents so they can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals and evolve in the complex and challenging landscape of today’s society."
- Loukina Tille, Catalyst, Member of the climate movement & student. Youth4Switzerland coordinator.
Vision
The Swiss youth organisations and networks are a vibrant collaborative ecosystem. We contribute to engaging the youth in all aspects of society as well as relevant institutions and bring together the leaders of tomorrow to spearhead change towards sustainable livelihoods and communities. The Youth4Switzerland Collaboration aims at bringing together young leaders from different organisations and topics to address the needs of young people and youth organisations to create partnerships and have more impact in implementing the SDGs.
The young people addressed by this project are already engaged experts on their topics. They are typically also aware that we are not making progress at the speed we must, that the voice of the youth is not heard enough and that we need different approaches to reach the SDGs.
With the Youth4Switzerland collaboration process we invite them to a space where they can talk about these needs and co-create solutions to address them. The methods collaboratio helvetica is working with can be a very strong inspiration for them as they would bring this new "how to" into their working fields and groups. They can connect to other leading figures in the field of SDGs, drive systemic change in Switzerland and beyond, and get to work with state-of-the-art methods in the field of transformation.
PRoject team
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Katalin Hausel
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Sarah Keller
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Loukina Tille
Project Lead
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Malena Ugaz
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Eda Elif Tibet
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Nora Wilhelm
“Within the youth movement we are too much in our different bubbles. Once we organised a meeting between climate strike and students from the university of St-Gallen. I was really surprised to observe how both camps started to move in their position even more extremely and how complicated the dialogue was. Overcoming those polarisations are crucial to solve today’s problems.”
- Johannes Tschiderer, Catalyst & Master student in Managing Climate Solutions.
"Youth in Switzerland are in a unique position to make use of social, economic, and cultural capital to build the discourse for systems change in a way that will create a ripple effect on the institutional and grassroots levels that is representative of diverse voices among youth networks and organisations. Access to spaces of power puts high responsibility on them to use their position with self-reflection and humility."
- Sarah Keller - Member of Swiss Anthropology Association’s Interface Commission & Student.
This project is possible thanks to the support of Stiftung Wegweiser.
The foundation strives to provide opportunities for young people to develop social awareness, holistic thinking and self development to strengthen their commitment to society and the environment.
Image credits: Mika Baumeister & Callum Shaw (Unsplash)
Contact
Loukina Tille - Youth4Swtizerland project coordinator.
loukina.tille@collaboratio.ch