Let’s begin with a simple fact, the two founders of Youth ID project – Jim & Yanis – should have left France today. Yet today only one member is on the flight to Marrakesh, the first step of our worldwide project.
Obviously, it is time for wondering if we are ready when I see 15C empty-seat next to me. A honest answer is for sure no. Many project holders or entrepreneurs tend to create a convincing argument to explain that everything is going perfectly right and minimize the problems. Of course the difficulty is to recognize and explain to partners that you have a problem. However, we do not want to be in denial, we think it is a mistake. We want to be transparent, that is why we create this first article of our new blog section “Youth ID Inside”. Why this new section ?
Why this new section?
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Plan A : Everything is running okay
Just because our partners trust us and know how planning such a project is challenging. They know that of course we cannot plan everything in a quantitative and qualitative study on the worldwide youth. For example, could we anticipate a breakdown of one of the video device? We have planned spare products for the vulnerable products but not for the cumbersome, solid and expensive one (we are a small association with limited funds, still looking for partners). As soon as we noticed the breakdown of our stabilizer five days before the departure, we came out with a new plan…
Plan B : Should we begin to panic?
We ordered a new stabilizer in Amazon. Hopefully, 3 days delivery at most, enough time before departure! And again, a huge mistake of Amazon who decided for us to cancel our order. (of course without informing us). The order was too high for a public wifi.
Plan C : Now we definitely panic
One solution left : spend the whole Saturday running everywhere in different shops focus on videos, sounds, music, video games, Djs (we tried everything!) to find a solution. And the result was … no solution – or we would have need a new partner giving us thousands euros. In specialized shops there are fewer choices and less low-cost ones. Because we love simple fact in Youth ID (remember: 51% of the global population represented by 1,65%) we found another one: we do not have our materials to do our video. Then Jim asked me:
I do not have any more alternative, should we postpone or let’s go?
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Plan D & Final Plan : We keep on and stay positive for the project
Because I am alone in the plane now, you could think that we both chose two different solutions… In reality, we both decided to keep on, more motivated than ever. I am going in Morocco to begin to collect statistic on the youth and Jim order (with a private Wi Fi) new devices and come Thursday. This is our new plan.
There are always unexpected events we should accept and share. That is the goal of this blog and Youth ID project. Our first advice: try always to have spare, anticipate in order not to ruin your bank account and in each case accept the unexpected events. There are part of the adventure and always finish with positive elements (I got two seats for myself on the plane)
Why Youth ID inside ?
We wanted to share our anecdote after requirement of friends and followers. Youth ID aims to foster other people to build similar projects up and feel ready before the departure. They were numerous questions to understand how we have been working on this project during the Youth ID ceremony. By the way, we would like to thank everyone who has come and enable to have quality exchange on “integration and participation of the youth in the decision-making process”. This ceremony was the opportunity to confirm youth are full of ideas but does not dare or does not know how to concretize them.
All the project long, Youth ID inside will try to explain how we managed to finance, which structures have supported us since the project creation, the administrative stuff not to forget and the mistakes we should have not made.
We are lucky to find partners helping our issues. We would like to say thanks to Circul’R and Follow Her who inspire us and help us to set our project up. Feel free to follow these 2 projects which managed to make the circular economy and African women entrepreneurship sexy.
Follow us as well in our project. We won’t spoil : but after three difficult days of separation, our reunion will be intense and we will have a surprise for you. Promise, the following articles will be shorter, but I was feeling lonely on the plane.