Sanzida Zaman
Youth Club of Bangladesh (YCB) organizes a workshop titled ‘Values of Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution’ at YCB headquarter at Dhaka on November 21, 2014.
The workshop included selected number 30 participants. The Bangladesh Today Sub-Editor, Rakibul Hasan presented the keynote speech in presence of YCB Founder President Arefin Rahman Himel on the day.
Later, the organizing team conducted the workshop sessions smoothly.
Earlier, we called for application to the interested applicants to take part in the conference and in this process, we used university and college notice boards to post our event updates and as results, we go massive responses from the youth, basically from social science background, also other backgrounders applied. Finally we arranged the event at Youth Club of Bangladesh.
We basically provided fundamental orientations of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Why fundamental? Because in Bangladesh, this type of workshop has been conducted for the first time ever and this discourse is very new to youth because entire country has only an undergraduate major on Peace and Conflict Studies. Through this workshop, we tried to let them know about values of Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution, conceptualization of peace, promoting individual role in peace building, individual contribution in resolving conflicts.
It is glad to share that many of the students never knew that peace can be an issue to think on it and end of the event, they really received as they got a decent acquaintance with the motives the workshop aims at. Some of the participants show their interests on peacebuilding in further steps. We limited the participants into a 30-member group for the event and this way the workshop gets huge responses and evaluation.
Only challenges we faced is seats were limited to only 30 keeeping vast number of students outside.
This event touches the crowding responses from the youth community of the country and we hope this initiatives return to us many more times as this is first ever its kind in Bangladesh.
The writer is Secretary General, Youth Club of Bangladesh. She can be reached at sanzida.ycb21@gmail.com