Youth For the Future celebrates Youth Week

There is no shortage of problems facing our young people today, but this week the population is taking centre stage with the celebration of Youth Week. One of the activities held today was an open day and open house at the Youth for the Future headquarters in Belize City. According to Program Development Manager, Kenrick Williams, Y.F.F. wanted to highlight the services offered by the secretariat and its departments: the 4-H centre and Youth Cadets, as well as encourage young people to become active participants in society.

Kenrick Williams, Prog. Development Mgr., YFF
“Youth for the Future does a lot of community service activities, we do a lot of community intervention programs, our units does job placements, we do several other activities and programs and so we want to highlight to the public and especially our target population: young people, the type of services we provide and how they can become involved, especially in our youth governance section, how they can become involved in the National Youth Council and getting involved in promoting good governance, transparency, accountability and those types of things. For example, we have our resource centre where young people can do their homework and we are really open until nine o’clock in the night. We provide that safe haven for young people to come and chill out and watch the news and really part of that positivity rather than being out in the streets participating in other types of activity.”

“If you look at the population, we have over fifty percent of our young people below the age of twenty. If we look a bit more, we have sixty percent below the age of twenty-five and so not enough people are knocking on the door of Youth for the Future and that is understood and that is why we have community intervention programs to reach out to them to get out into the community.”

Youth Week is being celebrated under the theme “Youths: strong and free, the foundation of our nation, empowered through full participation.”