For Your Consideration

The Young Ambassadors, a group of youngsters all younger than 25 willing to stand up and work for a better city. They are functioning as a direct advice to the government and several institutes.

Thursday evening I joined a meeting of the Young Ambassadors, in the City Hall of The Hague. Besides their usual progress reviews four party’s joined the evening to get advice and interest for all to participate.

1. At first a project, name is in development, motivating potential school dropouts preventing them for dropping out. Their problem; the potential dropouts are demotivated, and the existing dropouts are discriminated (getting back to school, into a job or institute later on).

The solution so far by the organisation is doing research and making interviews of dropped out pupils who are going back to work (like example stories). From this a movie will be made, presenting it to the potential dropouts and rewarding them with some kind of certificate of not dropping out.

This raised many questions amongst all ambassadors. At first putting a stamp on potential dropouts is not going to work and example movies of pupils who dropped out, is more motivating them to drop out than to stay on school. I raised another issue that this certificate would have a very tricky aspect as well, how would this “nearly dropped out”-certificate affect possible future education and work environment?

The idea to motivate the pupils is good, but the first understanding of the project is slightly wrong. The value of this certificate, like gaining competencies (with workshops, and lessons that interest them) could be far more interesting, like a scan of motivation, cause points do not only result in your degree, but also your motivation. Research, research, research, Please!

2. Then the next. A governmental fulcrum who takes care of people caring for sick people; one on ten youngsters is taking care of somebody who is mentally or physically ill. This fulcrum helps those youngsters to get the help they deserve, because many times there are many solutions for helping in their situation. But the fulcrum has a problem: These ‘caring youngsters’ are not looking for help, they think they are alone, and they cannot reach them. They have multiple buildings in The Hague but they are running out of clients!

The ambassadors and me are slightly overwhelmed by the situation and I indicate how they are managing their clients at the moment. The problem, which easily can be found by the first question is that they targeted these people by a word, a term, discriminating and separating them from the rest and that is exactly what these people do not want. Going to schools and explaining who they are and what they are doing is good and we suggest to do that a lot more than they are doing that right now, and not by giving those people a name, but offering those people help if they would like that.

3. The last presentation is about a woman who wants to create a book. But not an ordinary book, a book which is created by youngsters taking away prejudice, eliminating discrimination of cultural minorities. The idea was represented for The Hague Talentshow ‘The Komet’ to win money to realize, but lost without arguments –stunned faces-.

But, she is still going for a subsidy application. The ambassadors and me directly hand over more foundations, companies and institutes that could help her realize her idea...