THE YOUTH-LEADER PRESENTATION KIT
An Introduction to Youth Leadership – the Movement of our Time
This page lists videos and script for presentations of 45 to 180 minutes

  • for one to four 45 min sessions
  • for a total of 180 minutes
  • the major dimensions of youth leadership
  • with opportunities for getting involved
  • with follow-up options at and beyond school

WHICHEVER SESSION YOU CHOOSE

  • make sure to close it with the OUTRO at the bottom of this page
  • explaining how inspired students can spark youth leadership at their school using YL Media, Methods and Services

FOR YOUR PRESENTATION

  • 1. Use this webpage OR
  • 2. Download and print the Script, the Posters and Videos

ENJOY!

FOR PREPARATION
TAKE THE DISCOVERY TOUR

  • to know your tools and stories
  • to enable you to share anecdotes about your favorite hero/ines and causes
  • to know today’s most important social and educational innovations, youth leadership, the greater context of grand changemakers
  • to know YOUTH-LEADER media, methods and services

This tour is a worldview- and life-changing cinematic experience taken by every YL Ambassador, Warrior and everybody serious about evoking true changes for youth, people and planet.

TIPPS FOR YOUR PRESENTATION
Times are calculated pretty straight, with a little time for feedback and reflection.

  • Give time and space for conversation, following your group’s flow
  • If necessary, leave out a video; keep in mind: they’re all important!

That is why we highly recommend

  • to focus on contents in this session, and
  • dedicate an extra session for feedback, favorite causes, follow-up activities, founding a student club and first actions

Youth Leadership as a phenomenon, hope, vision – and the concrete long-term empowerment for your entire school community and region are too important to neglect. Go for it, give it time, deepen it at home, form a team and weave it into your life at school. THE PRESENTATION is the kick-off and a uniquely precious doorway into a bright new world – for all of us; give it the time and passion it deserves. YOU ARE THE MESSAGE!

SHORT Session

1 HOUR IN CLASS / 45 MIN — YOUTH LEADERSHIP – AN INTRODUCTION

INTRO
  • 5 min video
1/10 A TEEN’S CHANGEMAKING JOURNEY
Let’s begin with the full coverage of a 12 year old’s journey to success, from start to victory. Watch closely, this clip is a gem!
+ 11 min

  • 1 min read
  • 10 min video
HOW HAS CRAIG'S JOURNEY CONTINUED?
With Free The Children, Craig and his brother Marc started partner projects in 40 countries. To their surprise, the people “in poverty” who they blessed with schools, clinics and water pumps had much to teach them in return – to develop their country of Canada: The brothers were puzzled by the happiness and energy of “people so poor they could not even afford shoes or knowing where their next week’s meal would come from; and still they treated us with great joy and even sacrificed their last food for us.”

  • How come that these people are so happy, while us in Canada suffer so much from depression, bullying, teenage suicides and mental disease? They discovered the source of people’s emotional wealth and well-being to be the fact that “they love so much, they give so much” – and decided “we have to bring this spirit back to Canada!”

So, they founded a second movement!  While Free The Children focusses on bringing development help overseas, Me To We serves to re-animate positive spirit in Canada, to change lifestyle from Me To We (the 3-finger hand sign switches the M to a W), from individualism and isolation to healthy community, solidarity and cooperation for things we all love and care about – with actions at local level, for peace, self-love, and ending bullying, for the homeless, aboriginal people, sustainable lifestyle and more.

+ 1 min
2/10 STUDENT CLUB ACTION EN MASSE
And they decided that this movement needed a gathering – for celebration and motivation for a new year-round stream of action. This gathering they called We Day! Get a taste of it in our favorite We Day clip from 2010 (the numbers are ten times higher today).
+ 5 min

  • 4 min video
  • 1 min read

TAKE A BREAK – REFLECTION

+ 10 min

  • 5 min read
  • 5 min read
MEDIUM Session

2 HOURS IN CLASS / 90 MIN — YOUTH LEADERSHIP IN DETAIL

3/10 FUNDRAISING MAGIC
Fundraising is big part of positive change, be it for partners in need, for ecosystems or your own campaigns. It can also be a big challenge – to reach, inspire, mobilize people and reaching targets. But it can also be fun, generate record results, mobilize millions and your favorite recess and week-end activity! The champ to learn from is Lulu Cerone. Lemonaid Warriors make raising funds for favorite causes part of our lifestyle at and beyond school. Watch closely, how many activities she uses! Lulu has even become a toy figure, taking Philanthro-Parties into homes and living rooms! She also creates her videos herself.
Proposed group activity: Put together a list of fundraising activities that you have noticed in the videos.
Optional additional videos for long sessions:
+3 or 7 min

  • 3 min video
  • (2 min video)
  • (2min video)

SEE A YOUTH INITIATIVE UNFOLD

Let’s continue by looking at the steps and building blocks of a changemaking journey. You’ll see that the steps are surprisingly simple, evident and neatly lead one to the next.
THE SUCCESS STORY OF “BOOKS WITH NO BOUNDS” IN PICTURES Emma, Julia and Jack are your best friends and teachers. Their wildly successful initiative demonstrates keystones of success. And you can clearly tell how they build upon and interlink with one another.
Proposed activity: Name and list the building blocks that you identify in their story. Which ones do you recognize from other stories?
World Class Example for Social Media Work
The sisters manage the most vibrant youth-powered facebook stream on the planet. They practically make a new post or more every day on activities by the team, schools, authors, supporters, partners, shining faces, grateful children and teachers, events, awards, volunteering for other causes and charities, feedback from communities served as well as ways of involvement.
More Than Just Books!
By reaching millions of youth, teachers, citizens, authors, organizations and officials through their campaign – on social media, on television, in newspapers, at schools and events, speaking at We Days, winning awards and the public’s voting for starring in a popular cereal television advert … Julia, Emma and Jack have achieved more than collecting books.

  • They have changed their generation’s  perception of indigenous youth.
  • They have changed indigenous people’s views on citizens of the dominant white culture.
  • They have built bridges of friendship and cooperation
  • some of which have begun inter/acting through exchange visits now
  • and there is more to come!
  • and you have great power to become part of this world changing story in many ways (view their Action Kit)

You can do this – and you can do much more!

Click the image above to view the full graphic in a new tab. Click it for a large size view. Consciously follow the stream of events in photos and text, consciously observe each step, and memorize them for your actions in front of you.
+ 8 min

  • 2 min read
  • 6 min viewing and going through the graphic, step by step
4/10 SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Teens can do more than fundraising. Teens can also implement major sustainability solutions as social entrepreneurs – and they can do so with greater success than adults! Watch how Cassandra’s and Gabrielle’s initiatives achieve what adults ignore or tried in vain for years. They

  • implement a model solution
  • change policies
  • influence industries
  • influence schools and learning culture

Many such initiatives operate as student clubs or student companies, running a veritable “Social Business” – created for solving a development issue, investing all profits into the cause.

And then, there’s outrageous Babar Ali, who founded a school at age 9, for peers too poor to go to school. By teaching them what he had learned in the morning, he pioneered a youth and volunteer powered school model that has inspired millions and made it into textbooks around the globe. Babar has just built and opened a new school and invites you to get involved for equipping it with furniture, a library, children’s books, exciting novels, laptops and projectors for organizing mobile village cinema. So grab books and videos you no longer use, throw a Philanthro-Party and write the next chapter of this beautiful story!
+ 10 min

  • 2 min read
  • 4 min video
  • 4 min video
  • 3 min video
5/10 TEENS IMPLEMENT ADULT SOLUTIONS
The “Social Business” model is the brainchild of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, who applied it for helping rural populations in poverty overcome development challenges like night blindness, clean water access, telephone communication, solar power, finance and women empowerment. This means that teens can implement world-leading “adult” solutions! Once again, with success that has been way beyond the reach of adults. Watch these – this is big:
+2 min

  • 2 min read
6/10 CHANGING POLICIES AND INDUSTRIES
Young people today are taking on the greatest challenges of our time – and win! In terms of purity of spirit and intent, genuine passion, clarity, focus and determination, they can have considerable advantages over adult activists. These early teens celebrate sensational success, beyond anything adults ever even tried.
Robyn promotes the 3-pronged “Blue Community” Resolution, keeping water public, making it a human right and banning bottled water. In a single year, she has made 27 cities turn whole or partly Blue; that’s more than two cities per month, and she is only 13!
Rachel is Canada’s face for GMO-labelling. Her epic tv debate has more than 5 million views, she is booked out six months in advance and her public status has forced the nation’s Minister of Health to look at and acknowledge studies on epidemic rise of horrendous birth defects in GMO production regions and bans across the planet.
Madi and Rhiannon’s petitions have made the iconic Girl Scouts organization acknowledge that their cookies have a serious problem: they contain dirty conflict palm oil – responsible for large-scale, illegal rainforest destruction across South-East Asia and extinction of the Orang Utan, forest elephants, regional jaguars and countless other species that have not even been documented by science.
This is a business that’s often illegal, fuelled by obscene political corruption, mass human rights abuse, rape and murder of forest dwelling populations. The Girl Scouts organization has behaved like any dirty corporation, refusing to talk, claiming it was all clean and innocent, but there is no such thing as sustainable palm oil today. Only when the girls’ quest reached a national media audience, mobilized hundreds of thousands of people, and been honored with the UNITED NATIONS Forest Hero Award, Girl Scouts took a first small step. But the girls are not done yet.
When the girls targeted the bakers (huge companies) – Kellogg’s and ABC Bakers gave in – afraid that their dirty business practices would become unveiled, and that millions of children, parents, educators and activists will awaken to the fact, that their morning cereal and Nutella spread are drenched in murder, blood, bones and extinction of hundreds of beautiful species, ecosystem destruction and climate change. They have agreed to personal meetings and pledged to change things.

  • The two girls have achieved what global adult organizations with multi-million dollar budgets had failed for decades.
+10 min

  • 4 min read
  • 2 min video
  • 4 min video
  • (19 min video)

THE POWER IS IN THE HANDS OF THE YOUNG!

Madi and Rhiannon’s example equips children around of the planet with a magic wand to save a large part of the beautiful rainforests and its majestic inhabitants we love so much.
The Power and Future are in Children's Hands
Madi & Rhiannon show the power of youth – because industry is afraid to lose millions of young customers. Children have strong ethical values and do not want to eat mushy food that’s grown by making people slaves, destroying nature and extincting entire animal species.

  • Children need to wield this power, because industry keeps making claims of improvement, not through laws but self-responsibility; the result across industries is the same – no relevant change, only delays. Actually, they are usually lying!

Despite industry claims, corrupt companies and criminal loggers have started mre than 100,000 illegal forest fires to clear pristine rainforest to make way for stupid palm oil plantations. Indonesia is burning on a 2,000 kilometer stretch, causing the biggest environmental catastrophe of the century, affecting 5 countries, causing enormous suffering and bringing up claims of Crimes against Humanity. This escalation proves that industry pledges are worth nothing on the ground. Never in twenty years have industry self-responsibility claims had a relevant positive effect; they merely served to prolong the destruction.

  • And, it gets worse: Companies like Unilever, who have profited from rainforest destruction for decades today claim that their products are deforestation-free. Well … yes, because the rainforest has already gone anyway. That’s the trick and intent behind illegal forest fires.

For more than forty years, adult generations have been incompetent of bringing about change. Their elected officials, favorite producers keep lying and twisting slogans, laws and regulations. Shoppers keep lying to themselves. The time to act and unravel the sweets empires built on trashy, mushy food that no one really needs is now. No one really needs these products anyway; there exist better alternatives : real food and truly green energy, and also proper regulations, hard laws and real consequences for those destroying everything we love and need for leading the lives we all deserve for future generations.

  • THE POWER LIES IN CHILDREN’S HANDS, the solutions are simple, for everybody to wield. This includes turning the outrage that we all feel about environmental destruction into a law that makes the moral crime also a legel crime – a Crime Against Peace. The legal framework for making Ecocide a Crime Against Humanity is ready; changemakers and citizens are driving it forward at country, EU and UNITED NATIONS levels. Kids and teens instantly understand this law, they love it! And they can be the biggest force of driving this forward and making it happen in the next decade. More about this later in the extended versions of this Presentation.
+3 min

  • 3 min read
LARGE Session

2 HOURS IN CLASS / 135 MIN — YOUTH LEADERSHIP – IN DEPTH

YOUR LIFE OF AWESOME DOESN’T END WITH SCHOOL!

7/10 MEET THE TWENS
Youth leadership does not end at 18! Teenage student club members turn their experience and genius into active citizenship and lifelong activism, dissolving wrongs, transforming worldview and writing the beautiful, new story of a global, peaceful, just, thriving and sustainable civilization!
  • Chloe founded a green student club at age 12, in response to a threat to her home region’s nature by the nation’s biggest real estate company. With her friends, she also started the first student-led initiative to put solar panels on a school, and the country’s biggest reusable bag campaign.
  • At Harvard University, she challenges the institution’s immoral investment in fossil fuel to benefit from climate change. Divest Harvard has become the global icon of divestment from fossil fuels, inspiring hundreds of colleges, churches, corporations and pension funds to follow their example, divesting a total of more than 1,600 billion Dollars from immoral, obsolete, no longer necessary industries that are destroying everything we love.
+5 min

  • 3 min read
  • 2 min video
Young changemakers take on humanity’s greatest challenges, working for the good of all, yet often facing ridicule, opposition and direct threats to their lives. Who can these teens and twens turn to to share their experiences, pains and needs to achieve their goals?
  • YES! unites dozens of amazing hero/ines on week-long jams for sharing, healing, joining forces and building new alliances. Meet some of the finest of our time, living the ideal of “giving all that we have and everything we are for everything we love.”
+12 min

  • 1 min read
  • 11 min video

8/10 Meet more Youth – with Causes for Everybody!

Find out more about youth leading a wide range of initiatives. Are your favorite causes among them? Read out the posters to the group.
+10 min

  • 1 min read
  • 9 min read, posters

9/10 WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE CAUSES?

You can support, join and replicate each of these changemakers – and many more. We propose Level 1-4 Actions for each, from easy to advanced, local to global, short- to long-term, with favorite causes and activities for everybody, from research and media production to fundraising and campaigning, projects, international partnerships and social business, you name it.
PROPOSED ACTIVITY - study action kits & formulate mission statement
  1. Select the Poster of your favorite cause or hero/ine and form groups with like-hearted students
  2. Read the Story + View the video + study the Action Kit; use a mix of print, QR code via smartphones, Online Profile to access them
  3. Share feedback and feelings in your group, what surprises and what inspiress you. Then, in your group, formulate a Mission Statement to support, scale or replicate your hero/ine’s solution: “We will take action like … to bring about … by taking steps …, …, …. And we invite all of you get involved, starting with … this month.”
  4. Finally – present to your peers. Honor everybody’s commitment with a good cheer!
+22 min

  • 3 min introduction
  • 10 min read, posters, action kits, videos
  • 5 min for formulating Mission Statements
  • 4 min Presentation to the group
X-LARGE Session

2 HOURS IN CLASS / 180 MIN — CHANGE GENERATION MUSIC!

Every generation has its sound. And now, the sound of the CHANGE GENERATION has emerged, created by activists themselves. For the first time, people are expressing the spirit of “this is our planet and we are going to save it for our future” in song. They are early teens, and their vibes are different from anything we have heard, felt and seen in action before.

+ 12 min

  • 5 min
  • 4 min
  • 3 min
+ 15 min

  • 6 min
  • 5 min
  • 4 min
Meet the people behind the music. For the first time in history, we experience a combination of

  • wildly successful teen activists
  • Earth conscious, connected with sacred traditions
  • wildly talented artists

This is the source of the powerful spirit they express.

+ 1 min

  • 1 min
+ 24 min

  • 7 min
  • 7 min
  • 10 min

OUTRO

YOUR TOOLS & OPPORTUNITIES FOR TAKING ACTION

YL MEDIA, METHODS AND SERVICES FOR INSPIRED STUDENTS & CLUBS

Okay, you have seen what young people can do, what your generation is already doing and can to huge scale, all over the planet. The purpose of YOUTH-LEADER is to inspire, equip, enable and support you to bring about positive changes that you wish to see in the world. You – we – are all different, but we all share the agreement that it’s better that the world has peace, prosperity, liberty, opportunity, love and abundance for all. The solutions to achieve this have been created by thriving changemaking movements all over the world. YOUTH-LEADER offers all of you ways of being an important part of positive change – whether you wish to observe, support on occasion, or are on fire to make changemaking your full-time sport. And we care very much that your contribution comes with ace benefits for your personal, idealist and professional paths. Here’s a glimpse at what our youth teams are using and what you have access to as member of our global community.
+ 10 min

  • 2 min video
  • 2 min video
  • 2 min video
  • 2 min video
  • 1 min video

+ 1 min closing

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