Youth Future Conference-A Week in a Sustainable World
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It is 7:30 in the morning. Couple of young people go door to door and sing at the doorstep: “Morning has come, night is away, rise with the sun and welcome the day”.
Article by Ana Alibegova
A week in a sustainable world
It is 7:30 in the morning. Couple of young people go door to door and sing at the doorstep: “Morning has come, night is away, rise with the sun and welcome the day”. Instead of the irritating alarm melody of your self-phone, there is a new method of waking up, alternative, unusual and inspiring. It aims to motive the youth to get up and use the day to the fullest. This kind of a wake-up alarm is only a small contribution in the innovative approaches applied at the Youth Future Conference 2013 that took place in Bonn, in the first week of September. The conference would not be any different than the other youth events if one compares the diversity of the participants, but what definitely connected the people coming from almost 50 different countries is the first-hand experience of creating sustainability. Sleeping in an eco-friendly hostel in the city of Bonn, eating vegetarian and vegan food from the local farmers, drinking organic drinks and daily using exclusively recycled materials, the Youth Future Conference is imagined as a unique event.
United under the slogan “It is time to change the point of view”, the participants discussed the challenges of sustainability and the stumbling stones of development. The solutions were sought among the four dimensions of the sustainability: economy and innovations, ecology and environment, society and politics and culture and philosophy. From social scientists, to engineers, from high school pupils to PhD students, everyone could found its interest among the nine workshops offered: soil, post-growth, water, renewable energies, food, lobbying, photography, education and web of life. How to make the world more sustainable was the main question that the participants tried to answer together with the lecturers, mostly laureates of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. This award is more popular under the name Alternative Nobel Prize and gives credits to the people who find new solutions to the most persistent issues problems of today.