Everyone has preconceptions. Everyone is formed by their past experiences, their culture, their ethnic background and the place they come from. This means that everyone views a given problem differently and everyone has another way of approaching this problem. So what do you do when 50 young people from all over the world gather to solve a problem that concerns them all?
This is the challenge we faced as young innovators at the Youth in Landscapes Initiative. We needed to find a solution for the lack of available information on landscape restoration efforts in the Nile river basin. At first, we were a bit taken aback by the vastness of the challenge, but soon we discovered that the key to understanding the challenge, and each other, lay in active listening.
Active listening was one of the core skills that Hannah and Gabrielle, the facilitators of the program, introduced to us. The hard thing about active listening is that you have to supress your thoughts and get rid of any judgment. In essence, you have to switch off the voice in your brain. In order to listen actively, we had to forget our different backgrounds for a while, as they led us to making early judgments.
However, this doesn’t mean that we were hindered by the cultural diversity of our group. On the contrary, the clash of cultures introduced new viewpoints to each of us. It enabled us to come up with more creative solutions and to be more considerate of cultural differences. It is astonishing how much I learned in just a few days. Within four days, I was transformed from being a lawyer with an interest in the environment to being a full-scale youth innovator in the field of landscape restoration.
Participation in a program like this takes time, effort and courage. This means that you have to be pretty amazing to get here. The 49 young people I got to meet during the workshop were all incredible people, who are all experts in what they do, despite their young age. It convinced me all the more that the voice of the youth deserves to be heard. Youth participation is essential for international efforts to fight climate change to succeed.
In case you were still doubting the creative capabilities of young professionals: the solution we came up with was so good that we are exploring possibilities of making our idea a reality. I am really excited about this prospect. It will be a joy to continue working on this project with our amazing team and to create something that will survive our time at the workshop and that will actually be a useful tool in the field.
Henri van Soest is one of the 10 young champions who worked on the “Landscape Restoration“ challenge with Youth program’s partner: The CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.
Learn more about the Global Landscapes Forum Youth program, meet our 50 youth champions, discover the 5 Landscapes challenges they took up and the solutions they developed and pitched at the Dragon’s Den on 6th December 2015, in Paris.
