YouthMundus Festival - Boosting SDGs awareness.

By Greta Pons on behalf of Sustainavistas

The YouthMundus Festival Initiative is a global youth driven festival centered around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The 1st edition of the festival took place in Rome, from the 14 - 17th of November.

The festival was a pilot event developed with an innovative formula containing the most universal and powerful mediums of arts, including film, music, art exhibitions and interactive installations.

The overall feedback received from participants was the amusement of how the subject was tackle and the delivery of the message getting into the reflection and values of the individuals. I particular the connection with different cultures and how their activism experiences have been shared all around the world.

The opening ceremony and the night concerts were indeed the most success insights.

The most inspiring part was when the 11 Global Youth Ambassadors, all aged between 11 & 19 years old and coming from all over the world, shared, with a contagious passion, their stories with local young people.

The presence of institutions and local organizations contributed greater to appeal people’s participation during the opening ceremony.

The key learning is to work very hard on involving organization and institutions on the ground and to leverage their audience and communication tools.

The evening concerts were as well the highest success, were the bands were all from Italy and achieved to involve and communicate the message through their lyrics to the local young audiences.

A piece of learning is to work on the schedule in a smarter way and mix panels with musical entertainment in order to get some of the more “escapist” public to engage with the parts of the festival that were focusing on delivering a deeper message around climate change, sustainable lifestyle, mental health, LGBTQ+ and women's rights.
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The most challenging part right now is to capitalize on this event and keep people engaged and involved.
Heading up on the 2nd edition of YouthMundus we are contacting with different hosting country, in order to rise the interest of local partners and the local community to deliver again a success festival for next year.