Challenges or Problem Identification

“Young people are able to do many things that were never done before in  history”.  Over the past few months we have learnt a lot of new skills. For the most of us the Youth Social Entrepreneurship programme was something completely new, so we had to start from scratch. Before we actually started to work on the projects, we identified our weaknesses and strengths. This was done mainly to identify our strengths to help us improvise while we are working on our projects.

We also had a lot of fun games which helped to built trust and co-operation among the peers. The interactive sessions and the discussions were mainly for brainstorming purposes. Instead of approaching the problems directly, we looked at the situations that surrounded us. At first we identified a problem that we might have observed or experienced in the community and then we deconstructed the problem. We looked at the causes and the consequences of the problems and tried to get to the grassroot level. Therefore, our first step was to look at the problems rather than actually looking for the solutions. This was done to analyze the problems in a critical manner.

 

 

Having a look at the impacts of the problem on the community was also an essential part of the course in order to get a clear picture of what the actual problem was. So, basically we dissolved the problems and chose the problems that were realistic and doable. During this term we also had guest speakers: Michal Steyn from ‘Serve the City’ and Vincent Frenken from ‘Trajekt’ who are working with the local community through a volunteering NGO and Maastricht’s Social Services. Their talks were not only inspiring but also helped us get equipped with knowledge about challenges in the city of Maastricht or the region, that made us look at social entrepreneurship from a completely different dimension.

 

YSE is definitely one of the programmes that can solve many of the problems present in the community and also helps young students to develop into independent and creative people.

Dechen Zangmo (Bhutan)