Youth Leadership Development: YPS Leadership Program Responding to a Global Need
At 1.8 billion, young people are not only our future, but our undeniable present, critical partners to realizing sustainable peace. We know there is a critical need to find innovative ways to engage young people, leverage their creativity and energy, and transform organizations, societies, businesses and governments to respond to the challenges of our time through proven management tools and practices for success. Thus, the Youth, Peace and Security Leadership Program aims to be part of the solution.
This certificate was created in partnership between The Youth, Peace and Security project (YPS) at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) and the MS program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (NECR) at the School of Professional Studies (SPS), all at Columbia University. This webinar describes the YPS Leadership certificate program, what it aims to achieve, and what we are learning about youth leadership development.
Speakers:
Kobi Skolnick is passionate about supporting change agents to realize their vision for themselves, their organization, and our world. In addition to founding Lead for Impact, a transformative leadership development company, Skolnick has trained thousands of people worldwide, creating and implementing organizational capacity programs that sustain meaningful change for individuals, teams, movements.
He is a member of the UN Inter Agency Network Youth Development Working Group for Youth Participation in Peacebuilding, and served on the Steering Committee for the Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security, where he represents AC4 as the Special Adviser to AC4’s Youth, Peace and Security Program.
Skolnick is committed to advocacy for social change, peacebuilding, cultural empathy, negotiation and conflict resolution as pathways for making transformational change a reality. He believes that combining education with skill-based practice empowers people to turn their beliefs into behaviors, and their goals into reality.
Joán Camilo Lopez is program manager of the Youth, Peace, and Security Program at AC4, and he is also adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at City College, CUNY. Joan is particularly interested in understanding the role of art in youth resistance movements and its relation to the production of historical memory in Colombia. Through a materialistic perspective, he seeks to suggest an analysis of how the memory of violence and conflict is being remembered and represented by some of the youth that has experienced violence in all its expressions in the past 30 years in the northwest region of Colombia.