ForgottenDiaries.org

‘Forgotten Diaries’ is not a new organisation. It is an initiative of Youth Action for Change, a global, youth-led organisation whose main aim is to inspire and empower young people worldwide to become active change makers in their own communities. For more information, please visit www.youthactionforchange.org

 

Forgotten Diaries strives to provide young people living in areas affected by neglected conflicts with the possibility to make their voice heard in the media and through the media, by reporting on their daily life via an especially dedicated platform for the exchange of information and analysis of critical situations, expressing their right to peace while engaging their peers and the global audience into concrete actions.

Youth Action for Change sent out several Open Calls to several youth organisations, mailing lists, groups and social networks, asking for interested young people from certain countries to express their interest toward the project. Based on the application forms collected, YAC then screened and identified participants from the target countries we wanted to cover.

 

Our target group is young people aged 15-28 from different cultural, social and religious backgrounds, so as to have different perspectives and experiences represented. We also try to maintain gender balance throughout the project.

YAC researched several countries, regions and conflicts in the past months and decided to shed light on unreported, underreported and neglected crisis, conflicts and issues. We selected our target countries based on the years of conflicts and the coverage these generally get in mainstream media. We based our decision also on reports of several UN Agencies, NGOs (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, MSF) and governments. Although these are the countries we selected, YAC acknowledges the plight and ongoing struggles of many other people and countries; as our list is by no means comprehensive and may be biased, we still hope that this project may be of interest to you and helpful to many. We also hope to be able to expand the project so as to include more countries at a later stage.

We do acknowledge the fact that young people in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering as much as their peers in other ongoing conflicts, and despite our willingness to include these two countries, we decided to focus Forgotten Diaries on conflicts and crisis that often go unreported or underreported in mainstream media. We do hope to give these countries some visibility too, in the coming months.

Please refer to our 'Get Involved' section.