It's pitch time at the Muscat Youth Summit, at the Al Nahda resort near Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. The Summit involves nearly 200 high school and university-age youth from a variety of backgrounds, mostly Omanis with a smattering from the region, and a few from around the world. My colleague Andrea Coleman and I from the Young Foundation have been invited to offer a day-long workshop on social entrepreneurship to a group of thirty.
Our new Global Optimists website is up and running - and our first crop of young Heroes is now blogging about their experiences - check out the first couple of blogs here:
Kaycee de Belen, the Young Mayor of Newham, seems to be doing an absolutely brilliant job - here's a story about her work to promote safety for young people. She Newham has a noteworthy Young Mayor scheme and the whole area has really gotten behind Kaycee.
Today I had lunch with Sat Singh, who founded the Renaissance Foundation while still at school. Sat is not only a hugely inspiring person, he wants to take that inspiration to other young people too.
Sat told me how the Renaissance Foundation has created a DVD featuring interviews with celebrities and successful people from the UK and abroad, including the Williams sisters, Lewis Hamilton, Gordon Brown, Annie Lennox, Pharrell Williams and many others.
So, today is Thanksgiving, and I (like a few of the other folks involved in The Youth of Today) happen to be American.
For those of you who don't know, Thanksgiving is a secular harvest festival celebrated (at different times of the autumn) in Canada and the United States. The origins of the celebration are not well understood, but the popular myth is that early pilgrim settlers had help from indigenous people in North America to successfully plant crops; Thanksgiving is said to be a dinner they held together to celebrate the harvest season and this joint success.
Youth leadership is crucial to success of UK institutions
Many of society’s ills can be tackled by tapping into the energies and talents of the ‘Obama generation’ of young people in the UK, but without reforms much of that talent is going to waste.
The Youth of Today programme is conducting a survey of 13-25 year olds around the world to better understand how young people use information and communication technologies (ICTs). We are conducting the survey as part of our work on a publication on the subject (coming March 2010).
