Environment and Green Solutions Learning Club Catalysts Rolls Out a Digital Videos Campaign to Advocate For Nature

Earlier this year, youth from the South, North and Center of Jordan gathered in USAID YouthPower office in Amman to prepare for the Environment and Green Solutions Learning Club launch. These young women and men represented youth from across Jordan ready to put their efforts into environment related issues. Our friend, Nancy Syouri, is a 24 years old young woman from Aqaba, Nancy was one of these youth brimming with energy. YouthPower’s Learning Clubs are informal community-based safe together, and expand their learning and practice related to that shared topic of interest. The Environment and Green Solutions one of the nine thematic areas for the Learning Clubs. This wasn’t Nancy’s first encounter with USAID YouthPower, as it was back in November, when the Activity entered Aqaba and conducted its first wave of introductory sessions to youth of her community, that Nancy learned about program.

“I never dreamt that one day I will become a trainer capable of empowering youth peers from my community on how to generate impactful initiatives that would make our lives in Aqaba better”.

Discovering her passion along with various skills she never knew she had, Nancy partook in USAID YouthPower deeper until she eventually participated in the Youth Initiatives Designs Workshop. Nancy comments: “I never dreamt that one day I will become a trainer capable of empowering youth peers from my community on how to generate impactful initiatives that would make our lives in Aqaba better”.

Months later, Nancy attended the Environment and Green Solutions Learning Club launching and became a part of it. During a regular day at the learning club, the room buzzes with activity as youth share their ideas, and describe their visions for nature walks, recycling collection, tree planting, and recycling projects. Throughout discussions, each youth expertly demonstrates the soft skills they have cultivated as YouthPower participants – speaking with confidence and charisma in front of the group and demonstrating active listening and collaboration as others spoke. As an outcome, youth draw out their action plans, they map key activities for the clubs, deadlines, community and government stakeholders to involve, and required resources.

Since launching, this unique Learning Club have already collaborated with the Forestry Department of Jordan and rolled out a plan to plant 1,500 trees in Jerash to replace burnt forest. Unfortunately, during March, the COVID -19 global crisis erupted, and all public gathering and activities were halted, however this didn’t stop Nancy and her companions from doing what they do best. Nancy and her fellow learning club members connected the COVID -19 global crises directly with the environment, this made them obliged to do what they conceived as both; a necessity and a responsibility, to this end, and in order to solidify their roles as engaged and proactive members of society, they decided to create a digital awareness video campaign through social media. The campaign aimed at highlighting important awareness, precautionary and environmental issues that arose due to the crisis, such as plastic waste as a result of disposing gloves in the streets and public spaces, electronic waste and recycling.

Nancy says: “Our campaign was a direct result of what we learned from USAID YouthPower digital interventions, because the moment we were capable of conducting our training workshops online, we realized that the COVID-19 crisis cannot hold us back.” So far, the awareness campaign had reached around an impressive 2200 impressions and counting.Through the Learning Clubs, empowered youth are able to apply their skills and learning from YouthPower to their passions while engaging more youth along the way. In this case, they are also paving the way for a new generation of environmental leaders.