Advancing YALLA Initiatives

The Youth Action Local Leadership Alliance (YALLA) activities are designed to build on TYO’s Youth Service Learning Program. YALLA is a youth-led civic engagement program that targets eight university-aged youth and 16 youth aged 12-21. YALLA aims to achieve two primary objectives through the implementation of activities. The first is to empower university-aged youth to become community leaders, by providing them with structured, intensive skill-based training, and the practical opportunity to apply those newly learned skills through mentoring other youth in their local and regional communities. The second is to encourage the broader Nablus youth community to identify societal and/or community issues and address them by engaging in youth-led civic initiatives and becoming active citizens. Following an intensive skill-based training, led by regional experts, the Youth Leadership Committee (YLC) members will manage workshops about communication, reporting and management skills. All of the trainers had more than 10 years of experience in the fields of leadership, communication skills, public speaking, problem solving, report writing, outreach strategies and event management and organization. In May, the YLC members were ready to put their skills to the test by leading the first training for the program participants. The training included icebreaking games, role-playing, group work and a power point presentation to further emphasize the training topics of leadership, communication skills and time management.

Mohammed, a member of the YLC, started the training by introducing the YLC committee members and gave the participants the chance to introduce themselves and talk about their initiatives. Mohammed reminded the participants that initiatives should be community-based in any field such as education, health, and entertainment.

Afterwards, Nawras and Roula, members of the YLC, began discussing leadership and time management.  Participants then made connections between the topics of the trainings, and their own initiatives. Additionally, two other YLC members, Laila and Lu’ay, trained the participants on communication skills and through engaging teambuilding exercises and games. After this training, the participants better understood the YALLA project and by beginning to build their initiative ideas while in training.

At the end of the training, the YLC and participants agreed to hold the next workshop this coming Monday at TYO center. In addition, the YLC members explained the importance of attendance and of participating in all of the workshops in order to fully develop their initiatives and take them to the next level.