 The National Youth Council is using the Youth Month activities to promote the importance of exercising one's franchise. We have a report from an episode of the Youth Month series dubbed, Run The Talk, that features the Value The Vote campaign. Take a look. The celebration of the work and achievements of young people in St. Lucia continues as part of Youth Month 2021. A staple of the series activities is the Run The Talk series of the Value The Vote campaigns beheaded by the National Youth Council. Ajani Labon, second vice president of the National Youth Council, says the campaign encourages youth to become more involved in St. Lucia's democracy. We know that St. Lucia is a 42-year-old independent state, does not to some extent have a picture of young people who are meaningfully integrated and mainstream within youth development. So we recognize that there is a need for young people to be placed within a society or to understand the role that they play within the broader society. So the Value The Vote campaign seeks to do just that in providing young people with the platform to which they could sort of express not just their own opinions as to how the country should be developed, but also to understand how the roles of key institutions like the National Youth Council, clubs and organizations and other civil society organizations play a role in the development of society. The first installment of the weekly series discussed the state of youth development in St. Lucia. National Youth Council President Niaz Alfred says while consistent improvement has been obtained during the last ten years, more can be done. I believe that we need to get to a point in youth development in St. Lucia where youth development is people-centered, it is youth-centered and everything that we do has to come out of the input and the values and the contributions of our young people. And I think that is why a series, a campaign like the Value The Vote campaign is so important because it allows for young people to be able to contribute directly to what they want to see. Director of Youth in the Ministry of Youth Development and Sports, Mary Wilfred says an important step towards the improvement of the youth sector. It was the separation of the Youth and Sports Department in 2017. Before you had a youth and sports director and now the goal was to have youth have their separate budget so they can measure the outcomes of what they are doing and sports having a separate budget. And that gave us the liberty to now look at youth work in different lenses that if we now have a youth section of the ministry, how do we engage young people to become problem solvers in the community? And here came the youth workers, they are young people living in the community and we see them as our, you know, as our foot soldiers. Director of Youth, Mary Wilfred, as she contributed to the panel discussion at N.T.N. from the Government Information Service, Homedi Mark reporting.