By Luis Felipe Sierra Ordonez

Youth Advisory Group, GOYN Barranquilla

It is the second Sunday of January and like all of them, Esteban Charris, a 22-year-old, wakes up early to go out in his respected neighborhood of Las Nieves, in Barranquilla. He feels very proud of having been born and still living in the same place. His morning outings are due to his regular meeting with a youth group that he organized three months ago, to talk about issues related to the reality of his neighborhood and his city. The group is made up of young people of different ages, tastes and opinions. Generally, many of the conversations revolve around politics and how through it, they can gain participation to bring the necessary opportunities closer, with the purpose of giving their environment and its inhabitants the option of dreaming from the neighborhood and seeing everything they have always wanted materialized in it.

Throughout history, motivations such as Elías's have recorded great feats where youth has been the main protagonist, placing on the table the relevance of this population sector in the conquests at the level of society that have been achieved. The former Czechoslovakia in 1989 witnessed an exemplary demonstration of this with the Velvet Revolution, so called because in the demonstrations led by young people who demanded political freedoms from the communist regime of the time, they did not use any type of weapons other than the courage that resulted in the transition to democracy in that part of the world. Likewise in Colombia there are social feats that generated structural changes such as the Seventh Ballot movement, where under the leadership of a group of young university students around 22 years old, they managed to motivate an initiative that ended up reforming the 1986 constitution.

These same causes that throughout history have motivated the creation of various youth expressions exist in the feelings of thousands of young people. Many of them have decided to raise their voice, exercise their leadership and take the reins of social and political processes that have managed to change many realities, but have also marked milestones at the youth level, which have transformed the image of the young in the political environment and which have built such great confidence that today it is normal to see a large number of young people assuming representative positions, where they have a decision-making power capable of translating collective dreams into tangible benefits for the sectors they represent.

Among all the elements that can come together in the rising reputation of the youth image within politics, one of the most admirable is that young people have opened spaces for themselves. This means that the formula that includes channeling the rebellion of youth into a genuine social exercise has managed to be successful. The self-construction of a path that day by day becomes broader, but also longer, represents a challenge for the new generations, where they manage to be up to the discussion, with the necessary fortitude to tackle obstacles and with a sufficient sense of responsibility and belonging to respond to social demands that are increasingly more demanding.

Today, no one can refer to a young person by telling him that he is not capable. On the contrary, today youth is worthy of respect and fascination because it has known how to resist and defend its own, it has managed to trace a path of learning, demonstrating that the energetic and innovative nature of a process that includes the ideas of a young person can modify imaginaries and, above all, pave the way for the inexhaustible firmness with which great political triumphs have been built.

The above gives me compelling reasons to continue promoting a tireless generation and convinces me of how much it is worth leaving open the invitation to more young people to enter through the door of dreams, to become strong and to continue showing that youth are prepared to propose and build what their minds imagine, in relation to efforts to seek a better, fairer society where youth participation is transversal to all processes that are developed in any area of general interest.