Red Cross Blogs

Guest post from Kenya: “Be the change you want to see in the world”

By Katrina Crew
November 30, 2009 at 2:28 pm

Our Dance for Life co-ordinator Laura Deacon spends most of her time finding creative ways to help young people explore humanitarian issues. When she represented youth programmes at the Red Cross and Red Crescent’s General Assembly in Kenya, she found many other Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies are also looking for ways to help young people change the world.

As you can probably tell from my previous blogs, youth programmes were high on the agenda at the General Assembly and you couldn’t miss four letters YABC. YABC – or youth as agents of behavioural change – is a programme by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies focused on changing mindsets, attitudes and behaviour through a non-cognitive approach. It has been developed with, for and by young people of different National Societies to develop the skills they will need to change the world they live in, starting with themselves, their peers and community.

The first I heard of YABC was through the Solferino Declaration and, with my Dance for Life hat on, I was really interested in the idea of using non-cognitive learning, such as dance and music. I learnt even more about the programme at the General Assembly and was really impressed by some of the work being done.

YABC started its life in the principles and values department of the Federation and gained momentum when 25 Red Cross and Red Crescent societies from all over the world came together in Mali to develop a skills-based principles and values toolkit to empower young people as agents of behavioural change.

Mali Red Cross organised a camp for young volunteers from around the world to develop their skills through sessions on promoting respect for diversity, non-discrimination, peace, co-operation and mutual understanding. These sessions may have seemed unusual to those with a more traditional approach to spreading humanitarian values, but through music, dance, theatre and role play, young people developed and understood how these values underpin both the work of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, as well as their interactions with others in their daily lives.

At Solferino earlier this year, these 25 then shared their work with anther 500 young people and presented the toolkit to be used by Red Cross and Red Crescent societies to promote humanitarian values as YABCs. There was a special side event at the General Assembly designed to further introduce National Societies to YABC. In true youth style, we didn’t just talk about what YABC was; we demonstrated it through role-play and song.

Singing isn’t my forte and I was slightly concerned I was going to create my own humanitarian disaster by taking part, but the event was great and nearly all of the delegates who came to listen got up and were singing and dancing with us. You can watch the song in action at Solferino.

YABC is my hot tip for the future of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. I think we will see much more of it in the future and I hope to help lead the way for the British Red Cross with Dance for Life.

Image 1 © Solent News and Photo Agency
Image 2 © Dominic Cocozza

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Tags: governance, International, strategy, young people

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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