This is a letter written by Aakash Shah, Founder and President of Action for Pune Development, and Global Youth Advocate for MY World 2015 and World We Want 2015. He is striving to collect a million votes in Pune, India.
It is an honor to work as a Global Youth Advocate for My World 2015, and the ‘World We Want’ platform. As a Global Youth Advocate, I focus on involving people from different areas of society, as well as other initiatives to help mobilise and strengthen the campaign. I have collaborated with Radio Channels, Technical Book Publishers, over 50 schools, hospitals, Private Sectors, NGO’s etc. to promote the campaign and to collect votes.
There are over 50 MY World 2015 Youth Ambassadors around the world who help promote awareness about the importance of this campaign. In order to better explain each priority in the ‘MY WORLD 2015’ survey, we are organising various events in public areas that have to do with specific priorities in order to maximize the interest and understanding of each priority. For example, we organised a book donation camp to help people further understand the priority of ‘a good education’. We had various people donate books which we then gave to the needy & under-privileged. Similarly, we organised a Tree Plantation Drive on World Environment Day to support the priority of ‘Protecting Forest, Rivers and Ocean’.
In order to involve the youth population in this survey, we are collaborating with over 50 schools; each school has a minimum number of 1000 students. Every student has been asked to gather at least 10 votes. By doing this, we hope to maximize the feedback on what the youth population is most concerned about. We will be getting over 500,000 by the 12th of July, 2014 from these students.
We have also collaborated with Techmax Publications, who will be supporting our cause by printing a quick explanation of the survey on the back cover of the engineering and commerce books that they publish. We will be reaching over 450,000 students who study engineering and other commerce fields all over India with this initiative. They will also be promoting the MY World survey using their website and android/ IOS apps.
5 Youth Ambassadors have been appointed for collaborating with various corporations and MNC’s. We are asking the employees working in those companies to vote and spread the campaign. A group of young people will visit hospitals and interact with the patients in order to know what their priorities are. We have linked up with ‘Ruby Hall’- a well known private hospital in Pune. We visit economically under-developed areas on a regular basis and conduct awareness campaigns in the local language to help educate them on the survey. I have involved a great amount of people from various sectors of society to participate in the campaign and I am glad to inform you that, through our collaborated efforts, it is now possible for them to make their voices heard at the United Nations.
Currently, we are focusing more on offline voting. We expect that we will reach 1 million votes by the end of August 2015. We will provide the common man a platform to convey his opinion at the United Nations. We have reached out to a maximum percentage of the youth population, because we strongly believe in our motto, ‘Youth is the future of the world’!
For more info:
- City boy youngest at conference – article about Aakash Shah
- See the voting results collected thus far.
- Vote via APD Pune
