Active youth drivers of change

In my opinion, the formation of the young university student must not be made only of the formal education itself but it should also include informal aspects, such as active participation in activities like volunteer work, university groups, academic exchanges, forums and conferences.

All these things allow us to enlarge our knowledge and to experiment a better professional development. They allow us to understand better the world that surrounds us, which is becoming more dynamic and interconnected but, thanks to technology, times and distances get smaller not only being useful for our personal lives but also in business. The youth that understands this will enjoy a competitive advantage in the actual world.

The South American Business Forum allows us to be part of a global network in which interconnected between us we work actively to guide our actions towards a better world, being agents of change for our society.

Promoting SABF in my university was hard at first, but after the commitment and work we did from the Student Federation of UCA we boosted it, taking the compromise of promoting to more than eighteen hundred students that conform our college community in every headquarter of the country.

Since I’m a Delegate, I am constantly in communication with my college authorities and informing students, those interested in particular, to give them a little push to start their registration and to encourage those already registered to finish their application, given that it is thought that writing the essay is the most extensive and controversial part of the application. It is not easy to inform, that is why sometimes we need collaboration to be able to jump the barriers of the institutional bureaucracy or simply just cover a bigger audience.

In this way as a member of the Federation, we have been promoting SABF for two years. We posted in the student centres the promotional posters of the forum along with the rest of the material that we left for the students to dispose of. Also, we launched a digital promotional campaign in order to inform students through social networks and allow them to approach their corresponding student centre to learn more about the forum or just take a brochure. As a Delegate, the hardest part in my opinion is to transmit the enrichment that the SABF experience brings to other students in order to motivate them not only to collaborate with spreading SABF but also to be a part of it.

When I took the commitment as a Delegate I couldn’t stop thinking how to achieve the objectives given to me at the beginning of the year, which is why I found myself thinking all the possible ways to encourage the youth to be a part of it. I created an action plan with the SABF Team and we kept constant contact and communication. Once a week, they sent a report showing the amount of registered students so that I could think of how to improve these numbers and achieve the desired goal. We used the Social Networks and word of mouth between students to spread the SABF. We trust that this year, ex participants of our community will help specially with the latter and, in the future, we hope that we can get through all the obstacles and make more activities related to the Forum.

From this experience I highlight that it is an amazing opportunity not only to be a participant, but to also be a delegate. New and different challenges appear to outperform us every day, and to realize that we need more active young people to accomplish it. Therefore, we must be a youth involved with our environment and act in our community according to our ideals and values.