Day 2 of the Youth in Landscapes initiative’s workshop, Global Landscapes Forum, Paris
After bonding as a team during day 1 of the workshop, on day 2 the 50 youth innovators were ready to embark on a learning and practising process to prepare themselves for meaningful participation at Global Landscapes Forum.
Building skills for youth leadership
Based on last years’ experiences, active listening, critical thinking, facilitating discussions and pitching an idea were identified as those skills one needs to take up an active role and be a strong youth representative at conferences. One of the top 5 rules to gain such skills is “practise, practise, practise”, hence a lot of space given to “trying it” during the youth workshop.
Pitching an idea will particularly be crucial for the success of Sunday’s “Dragons Den”: our young champions will present their challenge solutions to a panel of high level professionals from whom they will receive live feedback. Claudio, one of our last year’s pitchers shared his experience with the 50 innovators. “Being a pitcher is hard work, but I am proud to have had this life-changing experience.”
Shaping the Agriculture Climate change Transitions masters
One of the Youth in Landscapes Initiative’s generous supporters is a consortium of European universities who designed ACT: a Masters program on agriculture, climate change transitions to be launched during the COP21. Didier Pillot, Agrinatura, presented the MSc and invited the youth team to provide feedback on its design. Three leading young innovators will collect the team’s input to present to the consortium at the end of the workshop.
Understanding the 5 landscapes challenges
Teams split into theme groups and started to dig into their challenges. Finding a solution requires going through a process of defining the problem and setting a set of criteria to assess plausible solutions. The groups presented their problem definition and criteria as well as the rationale behind this development to their mentors. This was a key milestone for the teams to confirm that they fully understood their challenges and that they were on track to find a relevant solution to tackle it.
The young innovators are now strong of solid critical thinking abilities and feedback from their mentors and peers. They can now move on with the development of their solutions and defining the “best” of them for tackling their landscape challenge.
