FYLM – Report

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DAY 1

Almost 60 participants from the entire Republic of Moldova, struggling with rain, wind and wild roads on their journey to the Forum of Young Leaders of Moldova – #FYLM! But don´t worry, we fixed it, even with the great support from the Ministry of Urgent Situations of Moldova.

The biggest challenge though is yet to come. How to unite 60 people from different regions, cities, towns? How to make them active and get to know each other? Of course, through the ice-breaking and trust games. It was an amazing activity-day for everyone.

It is very important to create an interactive and effective team work. The background topic of the event was “Community building and development” and in line with it we tried to make strong link among the participants from the very beginning.

Later, participants had an opportunity to discuss with Veronika Pavlikova Klindova – journalist, teacher, communication coordinator of marketing strategy at Teach for Slovakia and founder of the Slovak initiative #somtu, which is a social media movement fighting hatespeech on Facebook. Thanks to her own research, she found out that there is a much wider problem in society when it comes to hatespeech and she decided to take an active part in solving this problem.

In her own words, for the world to be whole, it needs diversity, interesting and fresh ideas, new perspectives of how to look at problems. “We ourselves are the ones who can bring this perspective. We need to know, that there will be days, when we want to give up. But until there is no improvement or solution, we should not step back. We need to break a problem down to smaller pieces and then, day by day, fix these partial problems which, finally, will lead to great outcomes.”

DAY 2

Second day of our event was focused on motivation of young leaders to cooperate and developing their communities together.

To identify modern youth challenges and face them correctly, we invited 2 representatives of most active organizations in civil society and youth policy in Moldova.

First speaker was Tatiana Kosteva, the representative pf Institute of Urban Development of Moldova. Process of community development and team-forming were the main topics of her presentations. “You can’t change things alone, you can’t go to the authorities by yourself. You need a team. If authorities see that you have support, then your voice will be heard, then they will accept you. Start from the team, which will lead all social processes in your communities. You are the leader, you need only leaders near you. Community need you and if you don’t start these changes, nobody will do it instead of you!”

Second presentation of Valeriu Dragalin, the President of National Youth Council of Moldova, was dedicated to the state youth policies, support of youth and the involvement of young people in decision-making processes. Their organization is an institution, that unites a lot of youth organizations, helping them with institutional and organizational development.

It leaded to the main activity of the day – youth problems identification. Participants identified 6 main youth problems in different areas (education, migration, labor, leisure time, local communities, state language problem) and formed 6 groups for creation of project aimed to solve these problems.

At the evening we got another portion of useful knowledge from the Arnold Kiss, who spent two years teaching kids from underprivileged families and helped develop many education and community-oriented organisations and NGOs. He was speaking about the ways of team building and how to identify and develop an idea into a real project, step by step.

Closing speech was made by the GaMCon project manager Samuel Goda. He presented the GaMCon project to all leaders and made a great motivation to everyone, explaining why is important not to give up, to help the society and to create a better community.

DAY 3

Final stage! Work on project goes very intensive. Participants were preparing problem analysis and idea description, but what about funds?

We started the third day with the presentation of Constantin Țurcanu, Director of the Department of youth in Ministry of Education, Culture and Researches of Republic of Moldova. Constantin presented main tools of state support for youth initiatives and possibility of participating in state budget distribution and that helped our leaders to solve problems with their project budgeting.

After final adjustments of projects, participants presented their proposals to 2 evaluating project managers: Samuel Goda and Veacheslav Dudush. Veacheslav, as a young successful entrepreneur was focusing on sustainability of the project and opportunities for funding and Samuel on civic impact and specification of goals of the projects.

Main task of managers was to give participants constructive feedback. During 3 hours, we could hear not only real problems young people face, but also concrete ideas and solutions to them. This was very inspiring bot for participants as well as for us as organization team.

After evaluating the projects of participants, the participants evaluated our event! During the very informal debate we received very constructive feedback which can help to improve FYLM for the future!