I just came back from 5 days of the Brightest Young Minds summit in Sydney. The general idea of the summit is to get motivated and passionate young people together to learn about creating initiatives, while also developing actual workable projects to be pitched to potential sponsors.

It started in South Africa and it’s now that country’s most prestigious and well-known youth-based development initiative. It recently arrived in Australia and within the two years has created a lot of good.

I love the idea and I think it should be more widely available. I was wondering if people were interested in doing a BYM in Malaysia.

While there are people trying to encourage young people to form initiatives, such as BarCamp and Young Entrepreneur summits, there isn’t really any clear support and education system that’s comprehensive. Also, information on actually STARTING and getting legal/financial support for your project is pretty low. There are plenty of youngsters with ideas…just no idea how to get them off the ground.

Having 100 other energetic young people, plus the support and knowledge of people in their field (we had Hugh Evans, who is pretty much THE MAN when it comes to youth development in Australia) would go very far in getting these ideas into reality. There would also be actual opportunities for delegates to create and develop those ideas before they leave - thereby avoiding the common youth conference problem where people are so motivated to crate change during the conference, but afterwards their energy drops and nothing gets done.

To get BYM in Malaysia we need to know the following:

• Legal aspects of using the BYM name and concept - is there some sort of “franchise kit”?
• Finding and recruiting young people to be part of BYM(M) 1
• Partnerships and sponsorships with companies and organizations
• Convincing people that BYM as a structure can work in Malaysia
• Getting BYM(M) off the ground and sustainable
• Creating a team of people interested in getting involved with BYM(M) behind the scenes
• Connecting BYM(M) to BYMs in SA and Australia
• Timelines - when do we start work, and when do we have our first BYM(M)?

If you’re interested, or know other people who are, leave me a comment or message.