It’s my personal belief that investing in young people is investing in the future. My friend and mentor and colleague Ali Raza Khan, the founder of YES Network Pakistan, has innovated this way, called youth-led changemaking, in which we can invest in young people and directly see the social and financial returns of that investment. And his model involves very, very little money to activate young people and gives tremendous results.

With Ali's support and guidance we have been able to take this model and test it in different environments through the YES Challenge. How does it work? Our facilitators reach out to young people and share with them about becoming a changemaker and the possibility of adding value in the society. And they encourage them to just test it out for themselves if they would be able to just launch a project that adds value in the society.

And how it works is that if they’re interested, they can simply sign up for one of the YES Challenges and then we give them a small amount of money, for example. twenty five dollars per team. And a team usually is comprised of three to five young people. And then they get a time period of, let’s say, two weeks to come up with an idea, to launch that idea into society, to make a profit and then to celebrate what they have learnt on the way.

And this is not per se about youth entrepreneurship, although new enterprises and new jobs will eventually result out of this. This is all about just activating young people and showing them that they have the changemaker gene inside of them, that it’s part of their human nature, that they can add value in society, that they’re not just passive consumers, that they can be the change they wish to see and they can be creators and that they have opportunities.

Watch the video above to learn more about the process and why your donation and support might be the best and most effective investment in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Thomas Jakel

Co-founder YES Founders Foundation