Pre Conference Workshop....

The pre-conference workshop on strategising youth participation at the 3 day conference was organised on 31^st October 2010 at CEE. 71 youth pursuing different professional courses participated in this workshop to bring in their perspective into the conference. The workshop started with interesting ice-breaking sessions that helped the participants to know each other. This was followed by Mrs. Madhavi Joshi’, address. Mrs Joshi is the Programmes head at CEE, who gave the participants a background of Earth Charter, and the conference.

Mr. Steven Rockefeller, Chair, Earth Charter International Council and Mr. Kartikeya V. Sarabhai, Director, CEE set the tone for this workshop through an interactive session on the Earth Charter and its relevance in the world today.  Mr. Steven Rockfeller, then entertained some questions asked by enthusiastic and curious youth, he answered all the questions in such an interesting way that everyone was caught in rapt attention.

 This was followed by working group sessions where the youth discussed their reflections on the Earth Charter principles and their expectations from the 10 workshops. Ms. Satwant Kaur, Regional Information Officer, UNEP ROAP helped facilitate the working group sessions along with the SAYEN mentors, Govind Singh and Utsav Maden. This session allowed for an energetic debate on various issues such as access to vs. potential of ICTs, need for consultative policy decision making, and the issue of understanding religion and spirituality and the idea of oneness. Together they decided that they would participate in the conference as workshop rapporteurs, plenary speakers, facilitators, and volunteers.

                                                                                              - Shraddha Ganwani