Issue 3: Process of Leadership Renewal
Issue 3: Process of Leadership Renewal
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Post-Panel Discussion
What can be done to increase the youth involvement in Tamil organisations?
Recommendation 1: Formation of Youth Wings
• The Indian organisations need to involve members around the age of 25-33 more and encourage them to learn. The youths belonging to this age category are working adults and would feel a larger stake in the community.
• Provide the youths with an opportunity to work with the existing management on the same level and hierarchy to organise events and initiatives. These dynamics will prove to be beneficial for the organisations.
• The current leaders need to be their mentors. Organisation leaders need to come forth and share their knowledge by having more engagement sessions. Thus a youth wing can be formed.
• So the recommendation is to provide more engaging sessions to involve youths where leaders can encourage them to take up leadership roles in Indian organisation.
• Youths now are more socially responsible and more vocal. Community leaders need to be participative and take the initiative as well. If leaders are able to use this to their advantage, they can invoke the interest of youth.
Recommendation 2: Organising forums and leadership training programmes in schools
• Many opportunities are only given to those students who perform well in studies. In addition, talents are identified very early on such that late bloomers do not get the same opportunities to learn as those who are naturally endowed with leadership skills. Hence, one of the suggestions proposed is that current leaders have to reach out to everyone instead of reaching out to only those who are good in academics.
• Some schools invite ministers to speak to the students. However, such events are restricted to students who have been performing well. The community leaders could eliminate such exclusiveness and try to reach out to all the Tamil students so that even late bloomers will have the platform to become leaders.
• A forum and leadership training programme where current leaders share with Tamil youth their leadership experiences can be held. In this forum, leaders would share with youth their thinking process. The emphasis would be on how the leaders come up with new ideas and the reasons behind coming up with such ideas.
• Many a times, leadership forums focus much more on the end-results than the process. When the focus is shifted to the leadership process itself, then, students can gain a better understanding of what it takes to be a leader. One of the current limitations that youth face is that they are unable to interact with leaders directly, i. e. there are too many layers to get past before meeting a leader. This forum would help overcome the limitation by allowing leaders to address the youth population directly.
• There are more open and direct criticisms given during closed door discussions in the absence of the media. However, the number of times these discussions and forums take place in a year is low and there is a lack of follow ups for these discussions.
• Leaders can also make use of social media to interact and connect with youth.