In July 2017, the World Youth Movement facilitated a working meeting in Belgrade, Serbia bringing together 10 prominent youth leaders to create a 3-year action plan for the network.

Participants of this meeting included WYMD Leadership Board Members, Hurford Youth Fellowship Alumni, and leaders of regional youth networks from: Argentina, Belarus, Cameroon, Hong Kong, Kosovo, Lebanon, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.  World Movement for Democracy Steering Committee Member, Glanis Changachirere also attended and helped to guide some of the discussions and deepen participants’ understanding on various global threats to democracy. During this meeting, participants discussed pertinent issues in their regions and identified populism, youth political participation, and gender inequality, namely LGBTQI rights and young women’s leadership, as priority challenges that they will collectively address through the network’s initiatives over the next 3 years.

The meeting participants also created a new mission statement and developed an operational plan, which entails creating a new website, building a new fundraising strategy, and restructuring the network’s leadership board. These new developments will be operationalized in the coming months. We can also expect to see exciting campaigns and cross border initiatives launched on World Youth Day for Democracy, which the network celebrates every 18th of October. To learn more about the 2017 World Youth Day theme, please click here.

This meeting comes at a pivotal time for WYMD as the network recently moved its secretariat from the World Movement in Washington D.C.  to the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Belgrade. This transition has been a long time coming and we are happy to see a dynamic youth network like the Youth Initiative take ownership of this network and make the World Youth Movement truly youth-driven.