Olaoluwa Abagun
Olaoluwa Abagun holds a Bachelor of Laws degree and a Masters in Gender and Development (with distinction) from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex under the prestigious Commonwealth Shared Scholarship. She was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria where she cultivated a strong passion for the rights of girls, gender equality, and youth-led advocacy/community mobilizing. She is the Founder of Girl Pride Circle Initiative – a registered girls’ rights advocacy NGO in Nigeria. Olaoluwa hopes to undertake participatory research that drives informed programming and policy-making for/with girls and young people. She is now conducting her doctoral research on teenage girls’ voices and social media at the Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland.
Olaoluwa worked with Peace First to examine the impact that youth-led initiatives have on community.
Community Engagement Initiative
To commemorate International Youth Day, Olaoluwa organized a 1-hour Zoom call with fifty young leaders within the global Peace First community. The objective of the call was to create a space for the Peace First global community to share and reflect on the key findings from the research project around the collective community impact of youth-led initiatives, with particular emphasis on social connectedness and belonging. Read the report: International Youth Day Global Community Call
Report
Peace First continues to amplify the work of young changemakers around the world, providing them with critical support to address various forms of injustices across their communities. This qualitative study “Young Changemakers Community Well-Being and Connectedness,” explores the collective community impact made by these youth-led social change projects, with a particular focus on community well-being and social connectedness. The findings from the study are conceptualized through the lens and framing of Peace First’s core values (the 3 Cs) – Courage, Compassion, and Collaboration. This study reveals the inadequacy of numbers and traditional measurement and evaluation tools to capture the different dimensions of impact made by youth-led initiatives. Looking forward, future research and programmatic interventions should focus on co-creating and developing new tools and metrics for young changemakers to understand and describe their impact beyond numbers.
Keywords
Youth, young changemakers, youth engagement, global, volunteering, programming, connection, social engagement.