Today a group of city kids spent all day preparing for a youth innovation competition that will be held tomorrow at the ITVET. It is part of Price Waterhouse Coopers outreach work in Belize. The objective is to get youth thinking about creative and effective ways to stop violence in Belize. Now, violence is a very complex issue to address in a 3 day workshop but one of the organizers say that they hope this initiative will inspire these kids to make a difference even if it is in a small way.
Brad Denning - PWC, Partner
"Today where are at ITVET, is part of PWC’s youth innovation challenge actually so we are working with a lot of the local schools and we are creating a competition to address youth violence in Belize so we have a number of teams from across Belize City that are competing for a prize and their task is to come up with an idea, an original idea to combat youth violence so we partnered every school with 2 or 3 mentors from PWC and we work on presentation skills, mentoring, coaching, confidence, resume building and interviewing skills."
"I think some of the more innovative ideas are of course from my group we are working with St. Johns, their idea is using art and art programs as an after school activity to take at risk youth off of the streets and to give them a save environment to not only explore creative outlets through art but to use that art to generate revenues for themselves, their schools and their communities I think that is one of many great ideas coming out of the competition."
"One of our key purposes here is to think not just of the 3 days we have been here. PWC has been coming to Belize for 9 years and what we are hoping to do with the youth innovation challenge is to establish a long term partnership in an individual basis with our individual teams so that we are there remotely to help them bring their ideas to life so the goal would be for the winning teams and the people that don’t win that doesn’t mean they can’t still try to get those ideas brought to life through partnership with PWC, their community, their teachers and the Ministry of Education."
The kids who were divided into 11 groups will be presenting their ideas to a panel of judges tomorrow.
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