My Experience Empowering Young Leaders from an Indigenous Community in Paraguay
Written by Evan Laugen, International Intership at Poverty Stoplight.
When I joined the Poverty Stoplight team in Cerrito, I started working on a project to increase youth engagement in the community. I had experience with similar projects in the past, and being essentially the same age I hoped I could connect with the young people and help them. It didn’t turn out as simple as I expected. It soon became evident to me that while my overarching goal was clear enough, it was extremely broad. I wasn’t sure just what was needed, nor how to explain to the local people why they should participate.
I was in a meeting one day with a number of young leaders about taking greater advantage of various initiatives for youth in the area when one of them said something that struck me. He explained that there are lots of people who come and give them things they don’t have, but what they need is someone to show them how to open possibilities for themselves. Someone to help them find inspiration to create positive change instead of waiting for outside aid. They don’t need more resources so much as the empowerment to make better use of the resources at their disposal.
That conversation changed my mindset about the project, and as I thought more about it, I realized that empowerment is at the very center of the Poverty Stoplight initiative itself. It’s all about opening people’s eyes to their own capabilities. The protagonists are not the employees of Poverty Stoplight, although their work is critical and noble; the protagonists are the people with whom they are collaborating. Empowering them to overcome obstacles in their lives is the idea upon which all actions are founded.
I then saw this mentality clearly at work in our goals for the young people in Cerrito. While we were hoping to make them more active in their community, at no point did we try to influence the form that activity would take. We wanted to open up possibilities for action so that the young people themselves could determine their own priorities and work towards creating the kinds of lives and the kind of community that they most value.
At the same time, understanding the mentality of empowerment helped me understand some of the challenges I had been having. It is, if not easy, at least fairly straightforward to lead others, but it is something else entirely to step into a new context and inspire others to be leaders themselves. Furthermore, it’s easier to facilitate your own project than to organize others around a project they haven’t even imagined yet. But while the method is more challenging, the rewards are greater. Focusing on empowerment creates a new cohort of leaders to effect positive change instead of leaving communities dependent on outsiders. Poverty Stoplight is helping to spread this mentality of empowerment.
