Youth and Community

By Emma Gordon
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Should young people be involved in making decisions about their community? This is a question that has many different facets and has many people wondering if young people have the capacity to be involved in community decision making. Do young people have the capacity and wisdom that older members of a community have to be leaders and make decisions?

            Sembrandopaz’s political culture team works with the citizen’s agora methodology, which is the advocacy tool used in local administrations for communities and is made up of seven sectors identified in a community: women, youth, church, education, base organizations, community actions boards, and ethnic groups. Various issues are discussed in the ágoras group and in the last meeting that Sembrandopaz held with the seven different sectors of the community. The young people here are trying to form a coalition to help bring more attention to the issues that youth face in rural communities around the Maria Mountains. These issues range from poor education, to lack of employment opportunities, to inadequate infrastructure. In one of these communities, a school was shut down because instead of providing lunches to the students, the administrators were using the money for different purposes. In the same community there have been three or four different contractors that have promised to build an aqueduct for the pueblo, but instead of using the money to build an aqueduct the contractors instead rob the people and leave them with insufficient infrastructure and no water. This type of corruption permeates throughout the society of the communities in Colombia and makes it difficult for people to trust outsiders, especially the older people who have experienced this kind of heartbreak and despair. So can young people really be knowledgeable about these experiences and should they be able to voice their opinions to help guide their community?

All seven sectors and Sembrandopaz came to the agreement that, yes, young people should be able to voice their opinion and help direct their community. Young people may not have the experience and knowledge that elders have, but youth bring a different perspective that the older generation does not have. Youth have different life experiences and therefore have different points of view that should be considered when making community decisions. Another point that should be noted is that the young people in the community are the next generation, they are the people that will be living in the community for the next fifty, sixty, or seventy years. It is important that their voices are heard because the decisions that are made today will be affecting them for decades. The youth will be the ones living with the outcomes of all community decisions. Young people should be a part of decision making and because of this, the six other sectors in the meeting all promised to include more youth in their own meetings and encourage young people to participate in community spaces.

As a seeder accompanying different communities, I have found that once youth come of age they want to escape small town life and move to the city. This may take place by going to college in a metropolis or finding work in a big city. The bottom line is, youth do not want to continue living in the countryside as agrarian workers. Young people want a life that is easier than farming and an easier way to have a better life is moving away and not returning to their little towns. In Colombia there needs to be youth with a heart for change, that want to stay in the countryside and to want to make it better and easier to live in rural Colombia for the next generation. Youth need to be a part of this change not only for themselves but for their brothers, sisters, and others that will come along. Young people need to be a part of these big decisions to continue the growth Colombia wants to see in its future. Youth are necessary to society and therefore should be included in making community decisions to better everyone.