Purpose

The Youth in Action Project focuses on assisting college students who have ideas and interests for improving society and changing the status quo. Conversations and discussions generate ideas and encourage them to develop their ideas and prepare them to organize their thoughts and actions to reach the outcomes they want. The World Academy members encourage them to take their ideas to action and make a difference by creating projects that will alter the future of their community or society.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Gender Equality; Quality Education; Partnership for UN SDG Goals. Achieving the UN SDGs requires changes in the status quo and the partnerships with others to make the necessary changes to achieve the intended outcomes. Often youth have new and exciting ideas but lack the ability to communicate or organize activities to achieve the results they believe are possible. These youth benefit by partnering with leaders to guide them and enable them to communicate and focus on their own growth enabling them to make a difference. Guiding young thinkers is a powerful way to ensure that youth stay connected to the future of their community rather than being frustrated, becoming resigned, or rebelling against it.

Project Actions

The team members of Youth in Action organize a Self-Reflection Day to help students identify how they can gain skills to improve their performance and better serve society. Students identify the personal areas they want to improve or alter, introduce strategies for developing growth plans for themselves and measure their own results. Groups of 10 students are organized to exchange and share what they want to produce in themselves and in their project and learn to communicate, organize, implement, and measure their success and failures. Interactions and sharing their views enable them to get support and different points of view and to re-design and re-do their project to produce better results. Poetry Day is to engage 10 participants in sharing poems and write their own poetry to share and discuss. Cooperation Day engaged 20-50 participants each month to identify social problems and solutions to solve them. No More Menstrual Shame was a project that involved 100 male students to experience electrical shocks, simulating menstrual pain, and understand how women are impacted during their monthly period. The video of this event went viral on social media and more than 140 million viewers saw this experiment. Many other projects are being designed to empower youth to take action and make change.

This project had 120 volunteers, 612 participants, and 140 million hits on their social media video.