2018 ANNUAL REPORT

Another year for the books

We exceeded our expectations for our 2018 Women's Empowerment and Youth Development Summit held in Saint Lucia in March.  We launched effective partnerships, trained new trainers, developed local capacity, empowered and impacted over 100 young leaders.  Youth are often drivers of lasting and sustainable change within their communities.  

We demonstrated effectively the type of transformational learning opportunities that can effectively inspire and ignite the inner spark within young people.  

We successfully highlighted that when given the tools and opportunities, youth can come up with innovative solutions to extremely complex situations and challenges.  

Youth we worked with this year exhibited out of the box thinking with detailed time bound and very practical solutions to very real and pressing issues. We placed youth leaders into internship opportunities to expand on their learning and training opportunities. We collaborated with the Saint Lucia Office of the Prime Minister, local ministries, UNICEF, UNWOMEN and UNFPA.

We placed students in internships that match their career aspirations

Aspire Artemis has successfully demonstrated the ability to engage in effective youth intervention activities through its Summits, internship placements, mentor engagement, and other training programs.  The successful Saint Lucian pilot kicked off as the first Caribbean program intervention in the region.  

Additionally, given that the many individuals in the organization’s leadership team have strong ties to the Caribbean region, there is an increased likelihood for these interventions to have an impact, as there already exists a comprehensive understanding of the Caribbean region, its realities and its challenges.  

Going forward, for all of its global minded interventions, Aspire Artemis sees it as essential to have local leaders involved and leading the projects that will essentially impact their communities and regions as the understanding of the local context is key to finding effective solutions.

Through all of its activities, the Aspire Artemis Foundation aims to contribute to long-term development, sustainably change lives, foster strong communities, engage in neighboring cultures and make an overall positive impact. Aspire Artemis strives to re-channel the efforts of youth toward more productive ventures. This year we have engaged youth in activities that have had a social impact as well as provided them:

• An opportunity to form lasting partnerships and share lessons learned with youth leaders from diverse regions as well as to benefit from the training of accomplished mentors.
• A forum to allow for the development of innovative skills that will allow for initiative building in their local communities as well as the opportunity to advance cross regional networking and relationship building
• An impetus for network building with committed young leaders working on issues that affected them in their individual societies.

As the first pilot Summit in the Caribbean took effect, it was worth noting the issues which arose organically from participants. Given that these youth were largely a carefully selected group, i.e. they chose to participate in the event driven by a pre-existing interest in youth development imperatives; the issues they discussed reflect considerable concern and preoccupation in their lives. These matters include the need for greater innovation and entrepreneurship in their respective countries, a real rejection for what they perceive as youth being conflated with inexperience, lack of respect for their contributions, an apparent lack of economic/professional opportunities and the need to include men in any and all discussions of gender parity.

Moving forward, Aspire Artemis aims to broaden its sectoral priority areas incredibly pertinent to current realities for youth from underserved communities.