YLM 2010

A very happy New Year 2010 to Ghana and to you!

We have been very quiet online since the beginning of this year, but very active offline.

YLM has a lot of projects for the youth of Ghana and will share our progress here for you to offer suggestions, constructive criticism and get actively involved.

I wanted to remind all of us that in Ghana, a "youth" is a person under 35 years of age. It does not mean that all the under-35 should sit and wait for the over-35 to provide help and advice; indeed, we all have to pitch in to make Ghana grow and fulfill our brilliant individual and collective destinies.

YLM is particularly  interested to promote education, vocational training, agribusiness and other initiatives conducive to self-sufficiency (as individuals and as a nation) as well as to our beloved Ghana's image abroad.

We are now starting a few initiatives within our remit. Keep  tuned, as we'll be communicating about them here.

In the meantime, please feel free to share your specific, concrete ideas on actions you may want to undertake but lack the means, manpower or anything else to get it out of the ground. Your ideas questions, etc., will be shared with the YLM Yahoogroup, who may help with ideas, contacts, advice, or even a different perspective. Very often, the passionate initiator needs someone less involved, yet interested and knowledgeable, to give perspective, a little more detachment to be able to see the bigger picture and smooth the few wrinkles that look like insuperable mountains to the person who is too close to them for objectivity.

With dedication and hard work, we will succeed!

Are you fired up for the motherland?

Hello Youth of Ghana!

We don't doubt we are all motivated to contribute to the development of your beloved motherland. To succeed, we must take a pro-active stance in everything we do. Development, and success, won't come from the outside and won't happen while we sit on our hands.

Our beloved Ghana is not a train with only one engine dragging many carriages. It is and must be an anthill, where every single being is a hard-working individual sifting through the events of life, rejecting unsuitable materials in their digestion process, in order to produce smooth and near-perfect contributions to the overall building that is our country.

We have to work at getting as much information as we can on the area in which we want to work. A developing country is like a nearly blank page, on which each of us can write his or her own success story. It is full of opportunities. Emptiness is not despairing void; it's exhilarating freedom!

Let's start with a vision: success; our own, and that of our country. Let's add to it our perception of where and how we can contribute to it; educate ourselves on the ways to reach the intermediary steps towards the overall goal. Let's define how to go about making a difference between getting along and succeeding.

And let's do it.

The 21st century is a century of unlimited opportunities. If you read this, you have access to one of the most formidable information resources ever invented by man: the Internet. Here, you can read about things done in the past, here and elsewhere, analyse what did and what did not work, ponder on a way to make a past failure become a success, and so much more. The mind boggles. The possibilities seem endless. What we know for sure, is that they are plentiful enough for all of us to develop, expand, and succeed.

Let's start the journey.

We'll be happy to continue the dialog and brainstorm together on the YLM-Ghana yahoogroup. To subscribe, all you have to do is send an email to: youthliberationmovement-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

See you there soon!

Team YLM

Hello All,

Hope your weekend went well. I will like to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves as Team YLM. We will be responsible to take up various roles in YLM to help bring sustainable change to our societies and our beloved country at large with the support of our external and internal partners.

We are a team and will encourage ourselves to be dedicated to the mission of YLM.

We are all involved in the brainstorming process to bring to life ideas to help individuals and the society we live in to progress. We believe everyone has a talent and with the right MINDSET we will prepare individual who will not only succeed as persons but will be ready to take up leadership position in the future governance of our beloved country.

There will be opportunities for the right individuals to represent YLM on international and national seminars in the coming year and years; and to promote our idea of practical sustainable thinking.

Our vision is to bring sustainable change in our core beliefs and behaviours pattern to the youth and lay the foundations for the future we want generations to come and sustain.

Without commitment and team work we can achieve nothing. We have a chance to make a significant difference to the progress of our beloved country.

Being part of Team-YLM will open doors and opportunities for the hard working individuals who do not think about their own success first, but that of the society they live in.

The most endearing endeavours anyone can commit to is make another person succeed.

Have a blissful week.

Regards

Kenneth

Officers, please!

Are you fired up for your motherland? Do you want to get seriously involved in shaping up your future and make an impact on those around you? Are you passionate about achieving goals? Are you driven to relentlessly pursue objectives? Does 'a true patriot' describe you? Are you self-motivated and ready to share this motivation? YLM is looking for youth exhibiting these pro-active traits to become officers in the organisation. By youth, we mean young WOMEN as well as young men. Stand up and be counted! e-mail YLM.Ghana@gmail.com with a description of where you are, and where you see yourself and those you'll have impacted in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Have a nice and fruitful day

Sustainable thinking

Altering society's long standing perspective from myopia to a sustainable mind frame will not be easy; but IT CAN BE DONE! After all, views of our society are images people put in their minds. By honestly examining and challenging the beliefs and assumptions that control our minds, we can see the perspectives that produce today's economic and social crises. New beliefs and assumptions make possible new thinking and behaviours. This means that anyone can become a sustainable thinker. Once we make a commitment to this higher purpose, we are in control of our future. Once we are in control of our future, we can help to decide the fate of our society and country. And with the right thought processes from new beliefs and behaviour fate works itself out to prosperity no matter who is there.

Founder's Day

Today is a holiday in Ghana. Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the great visionary and first president of independent Ghana, would be 100 today, had he lived.

So many things have been written everywhere about Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah that I won't add yet another hagiography saluting the great man.

A great man he certainly was. He had an acute sense of what Ghana and Africa needed, and he was determined to make it happen regardless of the cost to him. A dreamer he was, but -and that is what made him so peculiar- a do-er he was too. If two words can sum up what he was and what he stood for, they would be: a patriot and a visionary. He worked relentlessly at achieving what he considered his beloved country, and his continent, needed.

Now, I am more than a little disappointed that we decided to honour the great man with yet another holiday. Here was a man whom we recognise as instrumental in whatever significant progress Ghana made in the twentieth century. Here is the mastermind behind the very idea of African Unity, whom we implicitly and explicitely celebrate already with the African Union Day.

Today, our country, and Africa in general, is not visibly nearer to being a developed country than it was when Dr Kwame Nkrumah died 37 years ago. The engine is stalled. It sputters now and then, but never roars anymore and we are not going anywhere fast, or -some would argue defeatedly- at all.

Yet, our deciders found it fitting to offer us yet another day of sitting around omo tuo and a beer, or [insert your preferred holiday food and chilled beverage] all day. This, in itself, sadly shows their lack of vision.

Tomorrow again, omo tuo digested and beer-induced burps squelched, we'll sit and stretch our hands, hoping others will lend us money and foreigners will come and invest in our country.

What if, instead of flattering a very human tendency to laziness and carelessness, our deciders, driven by a real vision for their country, had launched a nation-wide selfless, community-serving activity? Plant a tree, clean the beaches, clean the street gutters,... There are so many things that need to be done to improve our lives, our environement and our country, and it seems so sadly strange that we should celebrate such a pro-active person as Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah by doing... NOTHING.

Wake up, my dear country fellows! your country won't develop without your participation, on foreign loans and foreign investment only. Stop selling it cheaply for yet another day of idleness and sweetness of life.

Call for Applications

As you all know, the next Population and Housing Census will be held in March 2010. Before that, a trial census will be conducted in five (5) District Assemblies across the country between October and November 2009.

All those of you who feel a genuine urge to contribute to the best of your abilities to the success of the motherland are invited to apply NOW for Census Field Personnel positions.

Over 45,000 volunteers will be recruited by the Ghana Statistical Service for the exercise. The volunteers will be spread across 36,000 enumeration areas throughout the country to do the counting. Transportation, training of personnel and allowances will be paid to field officers.

Help make the 2010 census a model for Africa!

Please write to YLM.Ghana@gmail.com for application forms, information, and references.