Education, Engagement, Empowerment: a reflection on Yale UNICEF's Fall 2024 Conference

By: Lauren Cho of Yale

SDGs: Quality education
As this was the second-ever conference for our newly re-established club, I had two main goals in mind. The first was to effectively spread interest and awareness of the diverse applications of children’s rights and related advocacy. The second was to encourage reflection amongst younger students (i.e., local CT middle and high schoolers) as to how they could become involved with advocacy through their own interests. This was a significant pivot from the previous conference I hosted last spring; although we had prepared an impressive line-up of guest speakers who were each professional children’s rights advocates or experts in the field, our target audience—Yale undergraduates—seemed entirely uninterested. Therefore, I wanted to see if engaging the youth themselves would result in more passionate, sincere, and productive discourse.

After brainstorming the conference agenda and securing our two speakers, Dr. Angelica Ponguta and Dr. Kyle Pruett (both children’s rights and development experts from the Yale Child Study Center and the Early Childhood Peace Consortium), I began preparing the room booking, catered baked goods, delegating outreach tasks to my co-director, creating promotional materials, and completing the relevant security and safety forms (as we were going to work with minors). These forms, in particular, were something that I had not expected to take weeks to be approved. Moreover, I had to work closely with our Treasurer to adjust the food catering and other conference materials according to our budget, as we had less money available for the conference than expected. These experiences taught me the importance of allocating ample time and budget to allow for flexibility in the conference preparation process.

On the day of the conference, there were two main events. First, each guest speaker presented briefly about their work and area of expertise, with brief Q&A sessions after each speaker. Dr. Ponguta spoke about the global poly-crises and the role of early childhood deveopment in mitigating negative impacts of conflict, climate change, and extreme poverty. Dr. Pruett elaborated on the importance of having partners chosen by mothers present and engaged during early childhood development. Afterward, the students broke off into three groups, and two Yale UNICEF members joined each to help facilitate discussions on three questions:
1. Where in your personal life and/or current issues do you feel that child involvement and advocacy makes or would make an impact?
2. How might you incorporate your passions and interests into bettering children’s rights locally and/or around the world?
3. What’s the biggest barrier to moving forward with this desire in real life?
To wrap up the conference, everyone came together to share out their responses for each question on Mentimeter.

The conference was undeniably a success, in that it was a marked improvement from the previous conference and laid crucial groundwork for future projects. First is the attendance itself. Nearly 30 students came initially to the Fall Conference, and 18 stayed until the end. Their active participation during the event also indicated that there is, indeed, a passion and interest in children’s rights and advocacy among the youth that we as Yale UNICEF can cater to and help build. Moreover, the information we gathered during the conference (i.e., the students’ passions and interests, as well as their perceived challenges and fears about becoming involved in advocacy), is invaluable to guiding our future projects. In particular, we learned that 1) student interests are truly diverse, ranging from nursing and fashion to gaming and sports, 2) youth creativity is equally as extensive (shown by students explaining their ideas on how to connect their interests to children’s rights advocacy), and 3) the youth currently do feel systemically and personally hindered from pursuing advocacy from multiple fronts (e.g., a poor education system, a lack of parental or administrative support, and lagging self-confidence).

From these results, I have the following reflections and recommendations. Firstly, I believe that implementing a quick icebreaker at the beginning and having more group discussions in-between potential guest speaker presentations may be more effective in engaging students for the next Yale UNICEF event. Furthermore, I am brainstorming a program where Yale UNICEF mentors interested high schoolers to help them develop advocacy clubs and/or personal projects. Finally, I plan to host a Spring High School Symposium in lieu of a conference this upcoming semester, where high schoolers will come prepared with their own presentations of how they are pursuing children’s rights and activism. If you are interested in collaborating with us, please contact me at lauren.cho@yale.edu.