[GSEF2018] Youth Session : How the young actors have changed the society through SSE?_Chantier youth wing

Category: 
North America
SSE Organisation
Class: 
Youth / Education
GSEF 2018 YOUTH SESSION – CHANTIER          

Presented at: GSEF2018, Bilbao, Spain
Organization: Chantier De L’économie Sociale
Date: Oct 1st, 2018
Presenter: Laurent Levesque (Chair of the Chantier de l’économie sociale’s Youth Wing)
Title: How youth in Québec (Canada) are changing society through SSE

Summary : 

The most important thing is not how young people change the world with SSE, but the ‘youth must change SSE’. However, the problem is that despite the heightened awareness, more youth have to move on in order to solve social problems, it has been difficult to collect the movement and energy of youth in Chantier. To improve this situation, a new structure called ‘Youth Wing’ was created inside Chantier in 2018.

Youth does not necessarily have to recognize themselves in the traditional SSE area in the same ways as before. Until now, if young people want to participate in the SSE field, they could only participate as staff or volunteers. In Youth wing, however, young people can get involved as an activist with a voice.

We should no longer deal with youth in a way that has tamed the former successor and should not treat youth as free labour to implement the plans for young people without youth participation. The issues that are discussed such as the importance of young people in the field of SSE, or simply those discussed for young people, are not very important to youth. Therefore, measures are needed only for youth on their own, and these efforts should actively introduce young people into the sphere of social economy and enable them to connect other social movements and the SSE movement. We need to build a structure for this.