One World Week

This year, we put hope at the centre of the story, to celebrate connecting people for an inclusive planet.  We invited young people, youth workers, volunteers, youth leaders, managers, educators, and the broader youth sector to explore what a sustainable future means for us all through the Sustainable Development Goals.   

The Sustainable Development Goals offer a way to address inequality, improve health and education, tackle climate change, preserve our oceans, forests, and build strong community.  They provide a framework to look at issues from personal, local, national, and global angles. For this OWW, we delved inside the Sustainable Development Goals and brought them to life to empower participants with the tools and inspiration to tackle inequality.

This One World Week focuses on Globalisation and our relationship and connection to a globalised world. Relationships and connection are core principles of youth work and in working with young people. It is these everyday interactions, conversations, stories, that define the culture of a group and organisation. Understanding the relationship and connections we have with global issues and global movements is also important in the development of young people and working with groups of young people.

One of the many challenges within communities and people around the world has been the dynamics of individual choices and collective decision making. It has been a moment where power inequalities have become more apparent in creating further injustice and inequality across the planet. The power of the individual mindset remains at the forefront of society with social media, consumerism, and mass media feeding our fears that is fracturing and dividing young people throughout the world.

In order to make change we need to understand the balance of and shift in power at all levels in our society. One World Week 2020 looks at tackling the theme of power. Understanding power is at the core of youth work in supporting young people’s development as they navigate through their lives and society. One of the main core values of youth work is empowerment. The road to empowerment for a young person can be a challenging, emotional, and a testing experience for both the young person and youth worker.

Young people across the planet have become instrumental and a leading voice in taking action against Climate Change and for Climate Justice. Young people want progress and want a say on how we treat our environment, to protect the future of the planet and ultimately the human race itself.

It is important to recognise that in this Climate Emergency (which Ireland declared in May 2019), we take into consideration and act on what is happening around us but also what is happening in developing nations – countries in the ‘global south’ who find themselves in the most vulnerable positions caught up in systems and conditions and issues not of their making against which they have little or no power to change.