This is so rewarding when we see the happiness in children’s eyes who we work for. We are inspired to get the best Social Actions Projects (SAP) award and this will help us to work more in the future,'' said Arif, one of the Active Citizens at the Active Citizens Regional Achievers’ Summit 2016.
Active Citizens is a social leadership training programme that promotes intercultural dialogue and community-led social development. This is a story of a group of Active Citizens from Khulna-the southern part of Bangladesh who discovered that the children in the deaf, dumb and blind school near their community are deprived of many facilities including extra-curricular activities in their school. These Active Citizens decided to apply their acquired skills to support these underprivileged kids. They started learning some basic techniques to interact with these special children with the help of their teachers of the school. They develop a routine between four or five of them to teach them drawing, singing, dancing and reciting.
This is one of the many Social Actions Projects (SAP) that were showcased during the Active Citizens Regional Achievers’ Summit 2016, organised throughout March 2016 in different cities of Bangladesh-Khulna, Chittagong and Rajshahi in order to recognise the outstanding achievements of the Active Citizens gained through their SAPs.
The Active Citizens Regional Achievers’ Summit provided a platform for the youths of Bangladesh to showcase and get recognised for their activities which bring positive social change. International Study Visit participants also got a chance to share their experience abroad with the audiences.
The summits held in three cities recognised 45 projects among 300 Social Action Projects. Social action projects were showcased in the stalls highlighting their work, objectives, challenges and achievements. A panel of judges assessed their merits and awarded the best ranking SAPs with crests- a token of appreciations of their hard work. The summits hosted interactive plenary sessions, panel discussions engaging more than 500 young Active Citizens in each of them to interact with sector expert and local top-level influencers.