With support from Canada Bridges Social development, we engaged in an initiative to train youth leaders in our community.  We started with a program called Unveiling Youth Potential (UYP) with the youth participants.

UYP is strength-based program that encourages young people to value their experiences and to share the wisdom they have accumulated with others.

We start off looking inward by examining our personal timelines and wisdom stories to feel grounded.

We then connect our timelines and personal stories with the larger story of our community. Engaging with the past helps to foster a sense of connectedness. 

We then try to paint a picture of the current state of our community by doing some community mapping. 

We first define what we mean by “our community”. We then identify the strengths as well as areas where we can build our capacity. 

Following this we introduce the notion of social entrepreneurship which is looking further into the question of what comes next/what can we do differently to better our situation?