Joy Bangla Youth Award 2017

Joy Bangla Youth Award 2017

Centre for Research and Information (CRI) and its youth platform – Young Bangla(YB) is back once again after the successful initiation of the ‘Joy Bangla Youth Awards’(JBYA) organised in 2015.

Joy Bangla Youth Award is a recognition acknowledging the untold stories and contributions of young achievers and leaders of all over the country from an array of fields. This Joy Bangla Youth Award Ceremony takes place to recognize the young champions of change of our county. With a vision to find out the young achievers across the county, portray their untold success stories before the nation and untie them under one platform, CRI launched the country’s biggest youth mobilization initiative YB in last November 2014.

The call for application has been open since May 14, 2017. Since then a total of 8 divisional coordination meetings were held nationwide. Meanwhile, town hall and campus activation programs are in process and shall continue until late July. The programs leading to the award are designed to share the plans for the award, the selection criteria’s and the importance of their roles in the upcoming events before the Joy Bangla Youth Awards – one of the biggest events of Young Bangla. This year, the Joy Bangla Youth Award has been divided into three broad categories, which are:

(1) Community Development,
(2) Cultural Activities
(3) Sports Development.

Under Community Development, there are several sub-categories such as violence against women, disaster response, vulnerable communities, youth training and education, etc.

The aim of Joy Bangla Youth Award is to recognize outstanding contribution by youth-led organizations from across the country in the fields of community development, cultural activities and sports development. For years, many of these youth-led initiatives and organizations struggled to find secure sources of finance and establish workable connections with the government instruments. Despite all kinds of social and financial hardships, many of them have overcome the toughest of odds in their respective settings to emerge with brilliant and innovative game-changing ideas for the betterment of the most down-trodden communities in some of the remotest and peripheral locations in Bangladesh such as the tea gardens in the east, indigenous communities in the southern hill tracts, and poor agro-based communities in the far north. However, for most of them, the award has changed things drastically. They now have much greater acceptability, respect and visibility in their areas and communities, leading, for most of them, to secure sources of finance, credibility and more important, support from almost all the walks of life such as the administration, law enforcement and local business and influence groups.

Apart from ensuring visibility, Young Bangla has also acted as the bridge between these youth-led organizations and some of the leading public and private sector entities including ministries, corporations and business groups and conglomerates of the country. Winners of the Joy Bangla Youth Award 2015 received the opportunity to partake internships with Ministries of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources and Foreign Affairs, ICT Division, and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, and so on. Private sector entities such as Microsoft Corporation, Aamra Companies, E-shop, Kormoshapan Pataton, e-Village project and Sheikh Russell Digital Lab (SRDL) have also offered brand ambassadorships, internships, service engineers’ training, labs and career trainings to award winners and also general Young Bangla members.

This year too, Young Bangla is organizing the award with the same aim of bringing 32 more youth-led initiatives in the remotest of areas to the limelight, in an attempt to make these proactive young individuals visible to not only their peers and social settings, but also to local and national level government agencies and policymakers.

The application window for the Joy Bangla Youth Award 2017 opened on May 14, 2017 and will remain open until July 31. During this period, organizations, who believe that they deserve the award, can apply by filling up an online form available on the website http://youngbangla.org/member/ .

During subsequent months at the end of the application, there will be a primary scrutiny, following which CRI-Young Bangla teams, including winners of the 2015 edition of the award, will conduct field visits to the applicant organizations. Based on the outcomes of these visits, CRI-Young Bangla will come up with the final list of candidates for the award. The award function will be eventually held in Dhaka in the last week of October, 2017.

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