 Where I come from, my country, the youth voice is never heard. The youth voice is never taken as important. Their voices are silent, and yet they are the most affected people in the community. And I'm so happy that today we stand with so many young people here willing to learn. Youth Diaspora Project was an idea we came up with, with how to engage with young people who are from conflict zones but currently living in the states. And the idea was that we could bring young people who are from different conflict zones as their area of origin, together to meet each other, to share their stories, and to talk about how to creatively engage with peace building. There are existing dialogues, there are existing diaspora dialogues dedicated to policy development. And if you look at who participates in those, there are entire generations missing. Young people do not participate in those dialogues. Young people have given up on the traditional institutional measures that exist for peace building. So part of our motivation in organizing the event is to increase youth participation in these policy processes, but also to change up the policy processes into perhaps formats or venues that are more youth friendly. And we all came together at USIP to talk about what it means to be a young diaspora in the states, how they relate to the conflict back home and introduce some creative ways to engage in peace building. We saw these two young people who are arrested from diaspora communities who are going to join terror cells. And instead, how do we have the next front page story be some of these young people who are trying to build peace in their community? I love to see how they can learn and get engaged on how to do that. We started by building and having people bring objects that symbolize home to them and to begin telling their stories about that and that's a very complicated story for diaspora. I think it means confusion most of the time, trying to figure out exactly who you are within your own community. A member of the diaspora is someone who is living overseas and usually they consider the country, then living to be their home, but there's always a strong cultural or ethnic link to the country they're from. Tell me about your stumbling. You know, I think as immigrants we have this issue of sometimes we're too, you know, like here I'm too Afghan to be considered fully American and then when I'm there I'm too American to be considered fully Afghan. So I definitely did make mistakes, but I think it's a lot in how you approach it. You know, I don't go into any community and think, I know the answers and I'm here to teach you, but I'm here to learn. You know, if there's a way I can help you, let me know. And if you feel like I can't, then that's fine too. I'll leave. That's not a big deal to me. And so I think going in with that perspective really helped me. And so I really was able to bridge that divide, but I did make mistakes. I've been struggling ever since I was like 10 years old with exactly being part of that diaspora because I was personally born in Western New York in a small farm town. So for me I feel way more American than I do Iraqi, but I never ever rejected my Iraqiness. I was always very proud of it. I just felt like I would never really be accepted if I went back to Iraq. So I would say being Sri Lankan to me is being confused because I can't be proud of it. I can't, but I have to be proud of it in some ways. But there's so much that's gone on, so it's very difficult to explain to people why it means I'm not on computer. I don't consider it whole. When people ask me where I'm from, well I say my parents are from Sri Lanka. Like I'm not from there. I was born in New York and then we moved down here when I was like two. So Maryland is like... The willingness to come out, to want to change what is happening in their community, in their countries it is very touching to me because that means showing a generation not just in outside countries that are coming from these more affected areas, how the young people are yearning for peace. Even you coming from far, far another country with our family, with our brothers and sisters for the world. Change my country is a step to change the world. If it changes, that means there is progress for the world. There is a hope that every other country could change. Thank you. These young people are struggling to find something that they can root to and that will give them a sense of opportunity and purpose. They're not given these alternative roads and alternative tools or shown that the tools that they actually already have at their disposal can be used to circumvent all of these other things. Well, music is a universal language so we can start there and hip-hop right now is the voice of youth. The notion of freedom, some say it's just a thought. I didn't think I could rap so that was really interesting. In fiction and fact, another government coup has started the attack. I think it took two times, two tries, going around the room for me to kind of get a beat going so I didn't know I had that in me. What I hope that you're going to take away from this is that there are many different ways that we can all bond and communicate and many different ways that we can kind of facilitate those things. And obviously it was interesting again to see you were talking about the message of hope of being on the attack against these regimes, you talking about your self-confidence, you having fun with your honey bun. But seriously, these were all very powerful messages and these were things that I didn't facilitate, I didn't say write about anything, I said don't write about anything, make no sense at all. And you instantly went to something that however whatever it was resonating with you and it was positive, it was a message behind it in some way, shape or form. So we have people expressing themselves in all sorts of ways using music, using photography, using film and the way that all of this gets out there into the world is through social media, digital media. You have a blog or you have a website or you go on Facebook. Training young people on how to use technology for social change is what I really care about. What tools would you imagine would make sense? So you're talking about sharing stories, connecting different diaspora groups and you're talking about sharing some resources. I want to give young people who have so much potential to achieve change some of the just tools and the knowledge of really how to reach out to their peers and influence the political process through online technology. Which communities do particularly want to reach? What we're trying to, what we're talking about is reaching the community background because of the way the government policies that people are not aware of how would these affect people, how does this policy affect people or like just making a decision that people are not being aware of it. But if you put it out there people would know what's going on in the government and they could have something to contribute to it. You know in the peace world there's a lot of global interest and global opinion. How do you make that visible? People really struggle to take global public opinion and turn it into something meaningful something that can have a political impact. Using online technology you could build a framework for that that can be really effective. We all share something, even for all different parts of the world there's a common theme in our conflicts and common thing in our problems and what we talked about is to be able to imagine what it would be like if you created a documentary where everybody from all, I mean people from all different types of countries are able to show that similarity to show people that we're not that different. Film and new media is a vehicle that young people get. It's a medium that allows young people to contribute their voices to policy development, deliberation, decision making. So we have basically an hour to kind of break it down and give you guys real core skills that you can then take and use and go out. It may seem a little daunting the possibility of making a film whether it be a short, feature length, whatever but actually when you break it down it's really all about telling a story. The film component is a really integral part of the project. This project wasn't meant to be just a conference. The idea was that whenever USIP has a conference generally we put out a report about it that's written and that goes and it meets with policymakers, it meets with people who are academics studying in the field and it has an impact but for the group we are trying to get we thought that having a written piece wouldn't be as accessible for them so we thought that we wanted to make whatever final product we had from the conference accessible for a broader youth audience but we also wanted to make it accessible for our participants to contribute. Maybe they don't want to write a report, maybe they want to do a film. Film is the perfect platform for those stories, for those voices and that's what makes this project different. It's not our voice, it's their voice. Now it's recording and then if you press the right button again it turns off. Okay so now you need to do something that you want to have immortalized. So we're going to be discussing today how we can better think about the future and find positive ways for working on post-conflict in Sri Lanka. There's a lot of different types of footage that was generated through these group flip camps. Some groups chose to go out and hit the streets and ask people if they even knew what Sri Lanka where it was. Do you know what flag this is? No, I don't. Can you guess? Okay, well it's Sri Lankan. Do you know where Sri Lanka is? Not exactly. Some people chose to do interviews with their family members or with their friends. My hope was to touch on the lives of a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds in Sri Lankan diaspora and sort of bring their stories up and say this is how people feel positively about our situation this is how people feel negatively just in a way that every other diaspora member can sort of relate and say you know what economically that's where I am or socially that's where I am in terms of my feelings about the conflict or back home or how I'm doing here. That's exactly where I am. They stopped me when I was on my way somewhere they stopped the car I was in and when they found out my name was Tamil they called another cop over saying it's just Tamil. But you could speak Singhalese. I could speak Singhalese and when he asked me where I was going I said the word Ami which is the Singhalese word for mother and then he was all like oh wait you're Singhalese and I said I'm half Singhalese he said oh okay okay you can go and I was so mad. There's a lot of build solidarity around who we are Sri Lankan diaspora is very divided on a lot of different lines and I think there's a lot of space for them to come together and sort of work for change both here both back home and just be a community. My name is Walgrain Marva I'm a grad student here at Morgan State University in Baltimore in the US and I'm here today because I want to start a discussion concerning issues back home I'm deeply concerned about the developments we have and I'd like to see a greater deal of change back home. Can you rate your role from one to ten and show us your future? Probably lower so like three or four. Explain why that rating. Because I don't really think I have too much a big role in Sri Lanka either. Because I've only been there once and I don't really do things that pertain to Sri Lanka. Do you keep yourself informed about the politics there their civil war when it was happening? Yeah. Do you feel strongly about it? Oh yeah. Because even if we lived here it did affect us because of the family there. Family you know. I want to see a change in our diaspora because right now youths have at most a minor role in what's happening back home. Now that's unfortunate because we have such an advantage here. What is it that we are such an optimistic and open-minded generation born in America raised with the ideals that we do not discriminate based on religion or ethnicity on color or language? No. Sri Lankan youths believe that we all come from the same motherland. That we're all Sri Lankans and that we do have a voice. Hearing a lot of the stories of different members of the diaspora at the conference kind of inspired me to push myself to do that much more. Hello. My name is Bahar Gadani and I'm a student here at George Mason University. My friends and I decided to do this documentary to test the American public's knowledge about Kurdistan as well as to understand some of the issues that the Kurdish diaspora faces in the United States. In order to do this I interviewed random Americans, Kurdish youth, and Kurdish adults living in the DC metropolitan area. For starters, let's take a look at how many Americans have heard about Kurdistan. Do you know where Kurdistan is? No. No. No. I haven't heard. No, I haven't. No. No. No. Do you guys want to take a guess? No. It's about the Kurdish diaspora movement in general but it's also geared towards the American public as well in terms of educating them about who Kurds are, what the diaspora movement here faces that's not necessarily unique to their particular diaspora movement. It's kind of assimilation issues that we all face coming fresh off the boat, you know, to the United States. We are, it's definitely going to be a short in this stage of the process but we just have so much footage and so much information I don't see why we couldn't run with it and make it something much bigger in the near future. I think it would be a really cool idea. This future, from one to ten, one being the lowest can be highest. My role in the future I would say hopefully in eight because ten to me is like, you know, present or something like that so I hope to be able to influence the health care sector primarily with women's health and reproductive health and hopefully as a proxy on child health. For me, those interviews really stood out of the footage that I've seen so far. They just hit the issues on the nose. They knew exactly what to ask. It was really impressive and the varying types of answers we got, the different people we were able to touch through this project and reach out to and get thinking about these issues to me that's really exciting. We all have a lot that connects us strongly to our homeland. It's time to put these strong emotions into something positive. We talked about building a stronger diaspora because I think a lot of times we think that because we're not in the country we're not able to make a change and today we'll definitely prove that wrong even if we're not there we can make a change while we're here and that's starting a building a stronger bond between us. Starting out I think it was maybe this arrogant idea that I'm going to come in and perhaps project my own ideas and experiences to this group of people where I maybe have nothing in common with it's kind of like what could you possibly have in Haiti or Nigeria. Iraq is so far away from all of these places but then listening to a lot of these stories it's like they live and deal with a lot of the same problems that you face which is we all come from these conflict-ridden countries and are all struggling to try and find peaceful solutions to these problems while living here kind of removed from that situation. When I was coming here I didn't know what I was going to expect but the sooner everybody stopped talking I felt like this is net a diverse common-growth meeting I feel like it's a family meeting because I feel like we're all connected. We're all at a point now where we have these skills and we want to try to put this together into something concrete and we all have our own goals and we should really sit down and try to work with each other and move on from this conference after knowing each other to find effective methods and adding to what already exists with ourselves. Personal level to understand where you're from to understand your stories to understand your background to understand your message and to get to know them so you know exactly what those people are and not just generally putting them in a box together. I think it's an opportunity to get young people who are involved and contributing to Peace Back Home together to talk about the similarities there are between the different conflicts and the differences and by talking about those things to figure out ways in which we can contribute to making peace at home and ways in which we can better understand what's going on at home and this created a forum where people who spent a lot of time here who hadn't shared ideas and come together and it was incredible. Very inspirational. So just that everyone has a role and it might not be the same role but making sure that we're letting the diaspora know that there is a role for you to play so I guess This conference really is inspiring because the ideas of using media and using art music as a way to build bridges and connections through different groups through that common language and that common understanding is really a great initiative and I think it's something that needs to be explored more. And diaspora populations for better or for worse have a strong influence about what's going on in their home countries and part of our theory is that we can help diaspora groups make peace here they can make peace at home and part of the theory is that you can get youth populations to talk with each other across these ethnic barriers that are more or less responsible for the conflict in the first place. If you can get these young people to talk with each other across these barriers maybe they can reach some sort of resolution that hasn't been able to be reached before. This other part comes in ethnicity over nationality. Now typically within the country because of the military leadership we're having what they've been practicing is a politics of ethnicity where they vote for someone not based on who is most capable to do the job but rather what ethnic group is from what tribe is he from what language is he speaking what part of the country those are determining factors when it comes to politics however once we leave the shores of Nigeria the dynamics completely change because I no longer care whether or not you're from my part of the country but you're from Nigeria you're considered my brother that's how that's how it goes. This project is different in a lot of ways USIP works with diaspora groups a lot we work with mostly country groups so the Darfur diaspora as a group the Democratic public of Congo diaspora as a group and often when we bring these groups together we often get a lot of adults we get a lot of people who are already active in politics a lot of elites and the idea behind this project is we bring all these groups together but we hardly ever see a young person as a part of that group having that input interacting with policy makers interacting with practitioners who are really working on this issue so the idea was to introduce young people to that dialogue and give them an opportunity and I've been to the USIP before I've seen important officials come here and there's not that many too there's not that many young people that come which is why a lot of the speakers were saying and to think that USIP is not focusing on the youth and recognizing that the youth do have something interesting to say something important to say and perhaps something powerful to say about the dynamics of their nation I think was what drew me to this conference that my voice does matter and one day I might be able to have a bigger impact that even I thought I could have Actually, I really want to say this to everyone here I really didn't know exactly what I was going to be doing today I knew my workshop but I have to say that you all inspired me I realized that what I'm seeing here is just a small cadre of the leaders of not tomorrow but today and it's inspiring to see so many young people who are really looking for new ways and new ideas to very old problems that still exist and recognizing that we have to find new ways and new ground to explore to deal with these issues and it's so powerful that it didn't matter who was speaking in the room from what country everyone had a commonality of wanting to make change wanting to find solutions and wanting to do it under a sense of community and understanding and this for me gives me a lot of hope for the future and today so thank you all I think in terms of this conference I would hope they would network with each other and learn from one another and not repeat the same mistakes that maybe someone else made so not reinvent the wheel and I think at times that can be very difficult to be able to take that leap of faith and go outside of the norm of what you're used to but I think it's necessary in order to create lasting social change I've gone to all the sessions I've listened I've participated and I've heard and seen their eyes they're ready to do what they can using the tools that you're giving them and today they'll go out there not just for themselves but they will also give other youth the same tools to use and that way one by one we will change this world