YES Alumni at the YDEAS IDEATHON

By Jovana Saveva (2014-2015, North Macedonia, placed by AYA in Kansas City, MO)

What happens in Ohrid, will not stay in Ohrid. The self-proclaimed motto when you gather 70 ambitious youngsters, from 5 different countries and you put them through 4 different laboratories by international trainees to indulge in a joint learning under the motto “inspire, connect and enable”.

Organized by OSCE was “THE YDEAS REGIONAL IDEATHON” project, happening from 4-6th November, in the beautiful hotel Metropol, in Ohrid, North Macedonia. This 3 days event grouped 70 participants from the Western Balkans into 4 groups and put them through 4 laboratories which ran parallelly.

The purpose of the project was “to trigger a digital revolution that is fair, socially and environmentally mindful, to act as catalyst of cooperation with local authorities, universities, the private sector and regional organizations, such as the Regional Youth Cooperation Office and the Regional Cooperation Council,” as said by Theresa Albano, the OCEEA Economic Affairs Officer and the YDEAS project manager.

Amongst the topics discussed, Mr. David Joseph, the data analyst of MyGrants helped us explore the untapped potential that Micro Data offers towards improving employment prospects. Their innovative platform was created to match job opportunities with the right set of skills, with the interesting twist of not showing nationality and gender. Creating an equality of opportunities for the candidates and provides the right skills and talents for employers, removing all prejudice out of the equation and “turning adversity into an opportunity”, as Chris Richmond, the founder says.

In the 2nd laboratory we got a chance not only to see the 5th generation prototype of Hydrogenio, a smart solution for producing more efficient energy through the process of electrolysis & a solution that could lower the pollution significantly, but also to build our own Hydrogenio from scratch. Under the supervision of our trainer, the inventor Claudio Lipodio, what we built was a low-cost technology that could help tackle the challenges of the environmental challenges we face every day and decrease pollution massively.

In the 3rd laboratory Mr.Volodymyr Kondzolka, director of Drohobych City Institute from Ukraine presented us with a smart approach to create a “smart community” through digitalization in our communities in areas like the hospitality & tourism, the medical systems, education and administration, creating a better and more efficient community with better communications and allocation of our existing resources.

And last, but definitely not least was amongst one of my favorite workshops, which I’m super passionate about and that was the power of storytelling and creating the perfect pitch idea, with the facilitation of the revolutionary trainer with experience in theatre and business Mr. Sergio Basso. A talented scriptwriter, an international award-winning theatre and movie director, who created one of the first Italian cross-media platforms in tears from laughter, using his theatrical experience to enhance our presenting skill-set right then and there.
Besides all the workshops, we had the chance to chat and  get to know each other more during each break, each meal and to explore the city of Ohrid in our free time, which made our working connections even stronger and our experience even more exciting.

At the request of UNDP as partner organizer of the event, nominated by the YES Alumni Association, to represent the American Councils were me, Rina Osmanni and David Mladenovski. Together we contributed with our knowledge, creativity and vision. With our immense energy we became close with many of the participants from different organizations and opened a dialogue of valuable thoughts and ideas, thereby creating a small community. Rina’s psychology perspective, David’s strong impersonating skills and my storytelling improvisation abilities were one of the highlights during our pitching-a-business-idea workshop.

All the workshops came to an end, as we were presented with a new meta-verse network called Lonac, a space that could allow us to maintain our connections and create future meetings and hopefully entrepreneurial and social ventures together. At that moment we realized that this is not the end, it is only the beginning and we all left the conference, ready to “inspire, connect and enable”.