Youth to Business Forum

Besides interacting with AIESEC members and alumni, there is another key interaction that brings a hell lot of value to my AIESEC Experience constantly: interacting with "externals" - people not from AIESEC, but from other organizations, companies, government, etc. Here in International Congress 2009 in Malaysia we have one full day called Youth to Business Forum, where we can interact with these "externals".

I just left one workshop with Alcatel Lucent about entrepreneurship and it was amazinly good. Basically we discussed very briefly our ideas around what is entrepreneurship and went straight to practice, working in groups to come up with business ideas, pitching these ideas to the other groups and receiving investments.

Our idea was very successful and it was brilliant to discuss it with everyone, because it's something that I do intend to do in the future: an experiential learning program that attaches itself to normal education, giving to high school students the chance to develop competencies and skills such as project management, communication, leadership, etc. Of course, it was also great to receive the feedback that there was some holes in our idea, for example how we are going to fund it which needs to be a little further developed.

I truly believe that not only we AIESECers gain with it, but also the companies by hearing the youth voice in this matter. I may sound a little full of myself saying that AIESEC is the youth voice, but, hey, we have some thing going on there, see this example:

Recently there was an youth program that took 50 young people to Antartica to study the problem with the gobal warming. From thiese 50 people, 6 were AIESECers. Consider we have only 35,000 students and university students are millions, I guess this is a pretty advanced representation when talking about youth that actually DO SOMETHING to change the planet into a better place.

Now I am going back to the forum.