The Mexican Delegation for the 28th Ship for World Youth Leaders Program organized an Earth Charter seminar for their international peers.
“It was… a space to see how small we are and yet, how big our impact can be to each member of the community of life.”-Workshop Organizers
The Ship for World Youth Leaders is a 45-day programme organized and sponsored by the government of Japan which brings together 120 Japanese and 120 international emerging young leaders to sail around Asia, building collaboration between nations and offering professional development and training to participants. The Mexican delegation, composed of 12 highly motivated, active, and capable young people selected from hundreds of applicants, decided that their contribution would be to bring the Earth Charter to their international peers.
In order to do so, the group of 12 delegates participated in an intensive training to become Earth Charter advocates, acquiring the skills and knowledge they would need to effectively impart the Earth Charter to others through workshops. Consulting with the Earth Charter Network in Mexico and Earth Charter International, they then designed a specially tailored workshop for the SWYL. After months of preparation, in January, they set sail.
The objective of the Seminar was to promote the knowledge and use of the Earth Charter as an ethical framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century, to inspire in the participants a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the whole human family, the greater community of life, and future generations, as well as to share a success case from Mexico.
The Mexican Delegates took turns guiding different activities in the participatory, interactive, workshop. They incorporated movement, teambuilding, songs and storytelling, mindfulness, and reflection and covered content including the Earth Charter, carbon footprints, and the Sustainable Development Goals. From the perspective of the organizers:
“It’d be difficult to describe all what this experience delivered to us as organizers, but it can be summarized in the fact that we were able to share something that has changed our lives with amazing people changing their own lives in a unique experience such as the SWY Program. The different moments of the Seminar gave us the chance to learn from the points of view of the participants and to think in a different way about universal concepts that usually we think can’t be seen in a different way.”
The Mexican delegates hope to work with the organizers of the SWYL to integrate the Earth Charter workshop into the core, annual programming, so that all future participants of the SWYL will come to know the Earth Charter as a tool and guide for our academic, professional, and personal lives.