Get ready to set your expectations for the YES!
The Youth Empowerment Seminar is the biggest event in YFU — an unforgettable ending to the exchange experience and a place to connect with our global community. You will find hundreds of exchange students, volunteers, and all around cool people here — it’s guaranteed you will leave with a bunch of new friendships and memories to cherish.
While first and foremost an educational event, the YES provides us with a lesson or two this year under the theme of mental wellbeing. The event also prepares students for returning home; facing the reverse culture shock and dealing with the hardships that may come with that. For volunteers, the YES is a space for gaining new skills, reconnecting with the community, and sharing their knowledge and skills with the new generation of volunteers.
“There is no other place like the YES to experience the legendary YFU spirit and re-connect with our global community"
– Zuza Nowak, Head of Track
But what to expect from the event this time around? Let’s start off with the theme, “Building Resilient Minds — From Idea to Impact”. The YES has been around for over three decades. Throughout the years, the event has carried a wide spectrum of themes, yet not a single one has dealt with mental wellbeing. This is one of the many reasons why this theme was selected for this year. While an extremely relevant topic for students going through the end of their exchange year (a tough thing to deal with as it is), our mental wellbeing is also directly challenged by the world around us: ongoing wars, instability, environmental crisis, inflation…
While many of these struggles would also make into a theme on their own, we see the value of approaching and empowering the youth through mental wellbeing and shedding light on its importance. We want to create a space for developing skills and tools for building resilient minds — which in turn will benefit the world around us, as we will be prepared to deal with its injustices and fight them.
"YES 2023 is THE opportunity to kickstart your journey of making a positive impact in the world!"
– Sina Riz a Porta, Junior Educational Activities Coordinator
Regarding how we learn at YES, we are excited to share that a revolution is about to happen: we are stepping forward from raising awareness to taking action by making concrete plans, implementing them, and gaining skills and tools that we can take with us after the event to use in our daily lives. This revolution comes in the form of a social hackathon, where students prepare different skills in four different tracks, and form teams in which they focus on different mental wellbeing related projects. These projects and ideas will be pitched to a jury on the final day of the event. The track topics are Design Thinking, Team Leadership, Public Speaking and Project Management.
So how to prepare for the YES? Getting into the right headspace for the event is simple: stay open-minded and curious. Expect nothing but a fun, enriching, and educational week full of heartwarming and inspirational encounters, a chance to develop and learn new skills together. It’s the people who make the event epic: YOU are what makes the event epic.
Let’s do this!
“As a conclusion of the exchange experience, nothing rivals the YES”
– Erik Sundberg, YES Host
Curious to know more about the theme, tracks, and the hackathon? In the newest episode of The Yes World Podcast we unpack these topics together with our Head of Content and Senior Educational Activities Coordinator. You can listen to the episode using the button below.
