Out Of Office recently designed a capacity building program to trigger future thinking and to facilitate meaningful and inclusive dialogues between the youth groups and local authorities in Dwarzark, Sierra Leone.
Dreamtown is an NGO with a vision to promote and create urban environments where young people can dream and act on their opportunities. They focus on urban communities and space-making in cities. In the last year, they have been running a project in the Dwarzark community in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Together with their partner organisation, YMCA Sierra Leone, they run the Urban Space Challenge, a competition for young people in Sierra Leone to develop innovative ideas for youth-friendly public spaces in slums.
In the Urban Space Challenge, youth groups from Dwarzark in Freetown have joined the competition to see who can create the most youth-friendly public spaces in their communities. Through various challenges, youth groups have been actualising ideas on how to improve their own public spaces, which range from public toilet facilities, basketball field, public water point, training gym, learning facilities, and a counselling centre. Also, they developed their own advocacy campaigns within the community to engage with local authorities and communicate what matters to them.
But what if young people could gain greater agency to anticipate, imagine and shape their future in the long term?
And by the future, we mean to spark ideas about the future of Dwarzark (and their role in it) in 30 years. To support young people’s capabilities and abilities to imagine different futures, to understand their own actions, to shape their future, and to develop more agency to have dialogues with authorities to discuss the future.
Out Of Office developed and designed these two playful future workshops to spark future thinking and facilitate meaningful, inclusive dialogues between youth groups and local authorities in Dwarzark. Using tools and methodologies from Futures Thinking, participants experienced ways to address the future, reveal biases about it, and help shape our image of it.
‘The workshops gave them a whole new perspective about the future and what they think about it.’ – Pious Mannah – Community Development Worker – YMCA
How we approach the future, will also define our answers and these workshops should be a catalyst for inspiration, imagination, and better dialogues between generations!
