Young Women Leading for a Greener Future – 14-20 March 2012

Welcome to the website for the Young Women Leading for a Greener Future events happening simultaneously at Sangam and Our Chalet from 14-20 March 2012.

In these seven days, more than 70 young women from a large number of countries are gathered in India and Switzerland, concentrating on developing their personal skills and their leadership skills in order to impact their home communities and the world on environmental issues.

These twin seminars have both parallel programme topics and make good use of the surrounding communities to get inspired for new and alternative ideas of working with environmental and climate change issues.

There are daily contacts between the two planning teams – and twice during the seminars the participants will also connect via Skype to exchange ideas and action proposals.

The two seminars will give daily updates about their work on the websites, and all comments and messages for the seminars are welcome.

The project

Young Women Leading for a Greener Future is a year-long WAGGGS Leadership Development Programme (WLDP) project organized by the Europe Region in cooperation with the Asia Pacific Region.

The project aims to empower youth leaders and workers, and in particular young women, to educate, speak out, act and motivate others to take action for a greener planet.

The project will involve more than 70 young women from countries across the world who will undertake national projects prior to coming together in leadership events which taking place simultaneously at Sangam in India, and at Our Chalet in Switzerland.

The events

Participants will experience leadership in the field of environmental education and advocacy by using WAGGGS' already existing resources in their own countries and then reflecting on how the resources could be improved or used in a better way to achieve greater impact.

They will also be guided to observe whether the use of the resources in their communities stimulated awareness amongst the wider population as well as report these findings back during the training event.

Networking and sharing will allow the participants not only to reflect on their experience but also to gain international understanding of the topics addressed by the project. Networking before the training event will take place through the use of social media and online surveys which results will be circulated to all participants and participating organisations.

After having implemented these activities participants will be able to inform the designing of the educational programme of the training event as they will have gathered information on what they could do more than what they did during the first activities to impact even more the ecologic awareness of their peers and communities.