Over 70 young students and facilitators came to participate in the 2018BEAM/ JUMP! Youth Leadership Conferencefrom November 2-4, 2018at the Lanna Human Resources Development Center.The theme for this conference was “Challenge 4.0 Change” and participants improved their problem-solving skills, practiced leadership strategies, and developed their own community impact projects.

This annual conference is organized by BEAM Education Foundation and JUMP! Foundation to bring diverse Burmese, Thai, and Thai ethnic youth together and engage them in community development issues.

Relationship Building

Friday was all about beginnings as the students got the chance to meet one another and get energized for the weekend to come. Due to the diversity of participants, communication could be quite difficult. Translators for Thai, Burmese, and English were kept very busy, and students managed to find ways to interact with one another despite language and cultural barriers.

The winning team of last year’s conference also visited to share their community impact project. They were impressively able to reach nearly 400 marginalized students in Chiang Mai and Mae Sot to bring them valuable information regarding how to apply and pay for higher education.It was amazing how an idea sparked from just one weekend training so quickly became a fully-implemented project that has already had an impact on communities.

Problem Solving

The energy remained high on day two as students learned more about each other and began group discussions based on issues that affect them personally. The students spent hours in small groups discussing community issues involving health, education, human rights, drug use, and public policy.

Despite knowing each other for less than a day, our attendees were able to have very open and personal discussions about how their own lives have been shaped by these issues. Students shared their own stories of medical emergencies in situation where access to healthcare was not a given. Others explained the pressures they and their peers faced in their home communities to leave school and work for the family. Others still opened up to talk about how drugs had directly affected themselves and their environments.

As these talks naturally progressed, the students learned how to analyze problems and see the interwoven causes and effects. In teams the students brainstormed problem tree diagrams to further map out these issues.

After analyzing the problems, the students were able to participate in a workshop on design thinking to learn strategies for building solutions to community problems. They learned the basics of human-centered design and practiced the steps to addressing, testing, and applying solutions.

This was an opportunity for the students to get creative. For example, one participant said she had trouble staying awake while studying, so her partner designed a way to squirt water whenever she became tired. Even more impressively, the students took their solution ideas and build real prototypes completely from recycled materials.

Project Designing

The last day of the Youth Leadership Conference allowed the students to take everything they had learned and apply it into designing real solutions to real problems in their communities. In small groups, students designed community impact projects addressing issues such as early marriage, recycling, endangered languages, school bullying, and much more. Impressively, all ten groups were able to design a detailed project and pitch that project in front of their peers.

With so many great groups and great projects, the conference already seemed like a success. However, the judges selected three winners and a runner-up to receive funding and mentorship opportunities to actually implement the projects they designed. Even though the conference finished, the work still goes on as these students will now take the lead in making these projects happen. We have high hopes for their continued work in their communities!

Thank You

The 2018 Youth Leadership Conference “Challenge 4.0 Change” was fun, inspiring, educational, and transformative for everyone involved. All of the students, teachers, supporters, and everyone else who made this event so impactful deserves a big thank-you!

Additionally, the conference was a success thanks to the hard work of our volunteer facilitators who led small group activities and translated between Burmese, English, Thai, and Karen. This event was successful thanks to their efforts!

And of course, this even would not have been possible without the help and support of BEAM and Education Foundation and JUMP! Foundation. This was the 3nd programcontinuing the partnership betweenBEAM and the JUMP! Foundation. Thank you to these lovely people for making this conference come together and for supporting students and facilitators become new leaders in their communities!

BEAM Education Foundation (“BEAM”) is a non-profit organization that enables sustainable social change through education. BEAM serves and empowers migrants and underprivileged learners from Myanmar. Since its founding in 2010, BEAM has built pathways for thousands of underprivileged youth through access to higher education, vocational training, mentorship, research, advocacy, and much more. To learn more about BEAM’s programs, visit: http://beamedu.org/

The JUMP! Foundation (“JUMP!”) is a non-profit experiential education organization established in 2006 in response to a need in youth education for programs that address issues of leadership and global citizenship. JUMP! acts as a collaborative platform for participants to come together to challenge themselves, inspire one another, and influence change in their surroundings. For further information about The JUMP! Foundation, please visit http://jumpfoundation.org