Workshops offer call to action for local youth
KWIC hosts Global Youth Day to inspire youth to rise to action
Local youths were urged to take action on issues at the 13th Global Youth Day hosted Friday by the Kawartha World Issues Centre at the Mount Community Centre.
Youth Rising from Inspiration to Action was the theme for the event, which featured workshops for youths aged 12 to 29.
Among the workshops were: Lighting the Fire Within: where participants explored all relations from an Indigenous perspective.
Food Sovereignty and Systems Growing and Cooking Sustainable Food: participants in this workshop created a simple vegetarian dish while learning about how to make a low impact, nutritious, and affordable meal.
Former Peterborough federal Liberal candidate Betsy McGregor’s workshop was From Passion to Action. In this workshop she devised several games that lead to the participants to think in creative ways about finding solutions.
One such game was as simple as a picture of a crow trying to get a drink water from a well but the water is to far down for it to drink.
This simple conundrum came with a verity of different answers from the participants such as “There isn’t enough rain. The farmer wants to keep the pesky crows away. We need to throw more pebbles in the well to raise the water level.”
This showed the participants that there are many ways of looking at the same problem and that not every not everyone looks at the same problem the same way. It was aimed at helping them grow their critical thinking and problem solving skills.
“It’s been really smooth. Everything’s been on time and the workshops have been inspiring and the keynote speaker was fantastic,” said Kaia Douglas, a member of Peterborough Youth Empowerment, a volunteer and co-organizer for the event.
Douglas explains the event had been run by Kawartha World Issues Centre for a number of years but stopped for a while before being approached by Peterborough Youth Empowerment to partner up and start it back up again.
“The has been pretty great and I have learned a lot of new things and I think it has been really fun,” said participant Beth Slepkov, an Adam Scott Collegiate student.
“My favourite part of the day was the second workshop I did which was poetry and the spoken word. It was really fun and exciting,”