As this was close to the wrap-up day about a program for MIZY Youth Council Members, I did a brief interview with Mr. Inhwan Ko, the president of Youth Council Member.
- What is the reason you keep doing the camp CLIS in different ways, as a participant, mentor, and manager? (Mr. Ko was the 1st CLIS camper and now he is the general manager of the 3rd CLIS)
When 2010, the 1st CLIS was held, I had an immature fantasy about the word ‘international’ as this word looked pretty incredible to me. So, I joined the camp and after 2 months, I wanted to become a MIZY Youth Council Member in order to understand about international exchange better and organize the camp CLIS. However, I faced a lot of operational problem such as mentoring system. As there were a lot of mentors and as their ages were similar to participants, feedback was not much organized, rather it was more close to bouncing personal thoughts. Also, the topic itself had a lot of problems. When I was a 1st CLIS participant, I was in education team. However, education itself can apply to almost everything: methodologically and conceptually. For example, environment design. The subject environment design cannot stick to one subject as environment is closely related to methodology while design is more conceptual. So, I really wanted to solve these basic, but hardest problems. However, at that time, I was a senior in high school and it was tough to me. Now, I thought that I can somehow contribute more to the camp as a university student, this is somewhat formal, and the real reason is: the CLIS is so attractive. There was a prominent figure called Kyung-hyun Kim who is currently working in ODA, who used to be the lecturer for the 1st and the 2nd CLIS. He suggested the idea that we can also do international exchange domestically. Sounds weird but I think is much progressed thought. One of the reasons why we do international exchange is to realize global issues and internalize those problems to solve it. Going to abroad and embracing foreign issues cannot be the most active part in international exchange. That’s what I realized and pretty much convinced by Mr. Kim’s theory. Afterwards, I saw a lot of students who were agreeing with me.
2. What is the most special factor in the 3rd CLIS?
Change of the topics seems to be the most extreme makeover. As you can see, topics are changed a lot. The 1st and 2nd CLIS used to have the team name performing art, environment, design, education etc. but now, we have 9 one-word topics like water, crack, and money. You know what to do with previous topics. For example, environment. If the topic, environment is given, all you have to think about is to protect environment. So pretty much things are fixed. Youth Council Members were complaining about this problem. What we wanted to do is to make people to have their own creative ideas. With this regard, we came with the MDGs (The Millennium Development Goals), but still they were fixed goals. Worldwide, we know these goals are needful, much to be achieved, and necessary. Indications, programs, campaign, are all set globally, and those things are fairly done by United Nations, not by Youths. We rather thought that the most creative things are from daily life not from somewhere else. Actually, this idea was pretty much supported by the chief of MIZY center, Ms. Young-ju Kim, and she came with the idea of ‘water’ for example, Water, is very useful and essential resource. Water is also a core cause of the conflicts and still many people are combating globally in terms of uneven distribution. Understanding water is also one way to understand one of the global issues: conflicts. Everyone was so shocked when the chief was coming with these ideas. We pondered, how we come up with these ideas, and that we came up with one word in order to be concise and creative. Youth Council Members suggested various candidates such as: pen, light, gun, and culled into 9 words. To wrap up, the fact: difference in topics itself is not that much amazing. We all know it’s just changed. But the background is meaningful to understand 3rd camp better.
3. Any difficulties or inconveniences?
I was only focusing on making the 3rd camp distinguished by the previous campers. So I ignored the lessons that I could gain from the preceding camps. View of the participants is different from director. It seems that everything is fine and smoothly, but the view of manager, we had some communication problems within the instructor and Council Members. We had a very wide range of age, 17-20, which seems to have distinct roles according to their age. However, individual roles were not clear and fixed. If the situation is given, sometimes role should be flexible in responding. But there were some miscommunication during camp. So what happened, we were so adjusted and familiar with our fixed roles, and we didn’t realize that young members can also do the better jobs. We did not ignore them, but misinterpreted and misunderstood their roles. I could see that these were the communication problem in this camp than the previous ones which is of course the consequences of overlooking lessons from the past. I was only focused on making an innovative, funny, creative, and exciting camp and less paying attention on communication. It had a positive point though. Campers enjoyed in terms of directors of this camp. In words of one syllable, it was not good governance, rather it was a good program.
2012 청소년운영위원지원서.hwp
