Deadline: February 5, 2020
The Youth Co-Design Team, in partnership with CIVICUS Youth, is responsible for designing the Youth Action Lab. It is comprised of nine youth activists from the Global South who started working together in August 2019 following a design thinking methodology and testing different ways of working between individual activists and established international civil society organisations.
The Lab is an innovative, safe, active, inclusive, collective, representative and connected space, online and physical for grassroots activists, which thoughtfully considers diverse contexts and ecosystems to better resource them to flourish with their communities.
Young people are facing increasing barriers and threats to their activism. Youth-led movements are unable to access sustainable resourcing, lack the technical capacity and networks to engage with political systems, and continue to work in silos, separated from other movements and activists across geographies, movements, and causes.
Often times, these barriers and existing hierarchies in civil society often position youth as foot soldiers and not as change agents. Through extensive research and consultation with stakeholders, CIVICUS has come to understand that designing an alternative resourcing mechanism that centers meaningful youth participation is imperative to achieve a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive civil society. Our solution to the aforementioned problems is launching a Youth Action Lab, an experimentation lab for ten young activists based in the Global South (Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the Pacific) that would support them in being more sustainable and resilient in their activism.
The Youth Action Lab adopts a right-based approach, equipping people to understand and claim their rights while increasing the accountability of those who should respect, protect and fulfill the rights of others.
The Youth Action Lab is a pilot project supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). This initiative is part of CIVICUS Youth and Civil Society Resourcing workstreams to build a more resilient, effective, safe and diverse civil society in the 21st Century.
Participants in the Lab work to build political solidarity and networks, strengthen capacities in engaging with policy processes, and access resources to support their movement. The Lab will act as a hub for testing new ways of working within civil society and mobilizing learnings from across sectors in support of youth-led movements.
Participants are expected to commit one year to remote and online training, meetings and mentorship, in-person workshops, events and engage in learning and general knowledge sharing with all Lab participants. There are interim reflection discussions which occur online with other participants, and an ongoing creative project which we require of participants.
A minimum of 8 to 10 hours per month is required to dedicate to the programme on the course of a year. In this moment, you should feel comfortable to participate in the program without overcommitments or exposing yourself to emotional distress or vulnerabilities that may prevent you from remaining engaged during the period of the programme.
There is a community dimension to the Lab, as the aim is to put high emphasis on confidentiality and trust-building among the participants. The programme will foster opportunities for the participants to get to know each other and a safe space for honest sharing, mutual respect and trust.
Benefits:
- Accessing Resources The Lab will provide participants with an unrestricted microgrant of up to $2499 USD, access to in-kind support and other non-financial resources, as well as capacity strengthening in order to support more sustainable and resilient movements.
- Developing Strategy The Lab will provide opportunities for capacity strengthening through peer-to-peer learning, coaching, and skill-building workshops with the aim of supporting youth activists to be more strategic and targeted in their campaigning.
- Building Alliances The Lab, through an in-person residency and regular peer learning sessions, will create spaces for movements and collectives of young people to connect, share experiences, and heal together, in order to build stronger alliances and more connected movements.
