Preparing Youth for Leadership (5 minute video clip)

  Shumei recognizes the importance of helping prepare a new generation committed to reversing the damage incurred on the environment and to restoring the natural balance. It acknowledges the responsibility of seeing that this next generation cultivates respect and understanding for the diversity of cultures and backgrounds that compose the human community. Shumei encourages young people to think of themselves as citizens of the world, with concern and caring for people from all regions and the issues that affect their lives.

  For the past several years, Shumei has organized a youth training program in Crestone, Colorado, where youth learn environmental conservation and team building skills. Guided by professionals, the young people live for two weeks in a nature preserve where they learn reforestation, see first-hand the interdependence of ecosystems and discover how to be self-sustaining. The goal is to help young people feel their connection to Nature and to learn that their own wellbeing is tied to the health and balance of the many life systems.

  In its effort to help bridge cultures, Shumei has sponsored Peace Journey, an annual program in Crestone, Colorado that brings together Native American young people with youth from other cultures for a weekend of exchange. In the summer of 2004, over 200 young people participated in this program.

As part of its youth leadership programs, Shumei has been committed to bringing together young people from areas of conflict to discuss how to overcome the traumas and stresses they face. In 2002, Shumei organized a delegation of young people from several conflict and post-conflict regions, including Bosnia, Rwanda, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East, to participate in a global peace conference at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. A young woman from Mostar, Bosnia spoke powerfully about her experiences during the war, as did a young woman from Rwanda, who shared the suffering of many of the young girls who contracted AIDS during the genocide in 1994. For many of them, it was the first time they encountered peers from other countries recovering from conflict and expressed their efforts at healing.

  In 2003 Shumei began collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme to develop a series of youth leadership summits to generate support among young people for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Millennium Development Goals were adopted by the nations of the world at the Millennium General Assembly in 2000. They include eight global objectives including environmental sustainability and cutting in half extreme poverty by the year 2015. The first summit was held in Dakar, Senegal in June 2004. The Pan-African Youth Leadership Summit brought together young people from countries throughout Africa and sought to identify and mobilize a new generation of leaders who could actively work in their communities for the MDGs. Shumei sponsored an international delegation of young people to the African Summit to help in the cultivation of international partnerships, one of the Millennium Development Goals. Shumei also organized a presentation on Natural Agriculture and the health dangers posed by large amounts of chemicals in the environment.

  Shumei assumed a larger responsibility in collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme for the organization of the Pan-Asian Youth Leadership Summit, sponsoring youth leaders from every country in Asia and the Pacific to Hiroshima, Japan in September 2004. These regional summits are preparatory meetings for a Global Youth Leadership Summit that will take place at United Nations headquarters in New York in October 2006. This will take place as the nations of the world come together to assess their five-year progress in achieving the development targets set in 2000. Shumei’s vision is to help educate young people on global issues and to motivate them to assume responsibility, particularly in the area of the environment, but in all areas of human development, so that new, more sustainable models of development can be achieved.