Young people building a future together
Be honest with yourselves – can you imagine what living in Israel would look like in twenty years from now? What can you visualize, an optimistic or a pessimistic picture? And how does that impact the important decisions you have to make at present?
It is particularly interesting to pose these questions to young people living in Israel today – the millennium children and the following generation, who will be next in line to take charge of shaping our future society. What do they believe in? What kind of future do they imagine? And following that – what kind of future would they like to promote? Studies conducted among millennial juveniles living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – Jews and Palestinians – draw a similar picture on both sides of the Green Line. Both juvenile populations believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unsolvable, and they have no faith whatsoever in politics or in politicians. The combination of these two elements creates a dead end – if young people believe there is no solution to the conflict, and there is no point in using political tools to change the situation, then this is just the recipe for undermining the most fundamental principles of democracy. In order for something to change, it is important to nurture young people’s political imagination skills – the ability to look forward in time, to imagine possible futures and to form an attitude and a plan to deal with them.
The Tzvaim Program (Young People Building Futures Together) was initiated by Julie Khromchenko and is supported and accompanied by IDE as an entrepreneurship, allowing the Institute’s workers to launch initiatives related to their interest areas and their passions. The program offers guided processes of learning and creating, enabling the youngsters to practice their ability to imagine possible futures. It is operable in various forms – as an academic course for students, as a seminar for trainees in a youth movement, or as a learning process for high school students – and in its course the juvenile group constructs various scenarios for the future of the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, from aspects that they choose to focus on.
The process allows a lot of room for mutual creation, playfulness and humor – besides in-depth discussions and learning about complex issues on our civic agenda. The creation of future scenarios together by a diverse group of people, whose members come from different places and who would not necessarily meet in the reality outside the process, can help create bonds and a profound understanding that only by working together can we achieve an optimistic future.
For more details please contact: Yulie.khro@gmail.com