Opening: Dekwane Youth Center

Save the Children’s Beirut field office has opened its third and final youth center on Thursday the 30th of October in Dekwane, under the Japan Platform (JPF) fund. The project is being implemented in six communities: three in Bekaa, and three in Beirut.

The centers target adolescents and youth aged between 14 and 24 from both refugee and host communities. The aim of the project is to strengthen relationships between Lebanese youth and Syrian, Palestinian and Iraqi refugee adolescents.

(Beirut's Child Protection team and Dekwene Youth Center's facilitators)

The project selects youth facilitators from each community and provides them with training on life skills, community mobilization and facilitation. In turn, facilitators along with Child Protection staff implement the trainings to other adolescents and youth of different communities. The centers provide skills trainings through English, computer, and financial literacy classes; as well as humanitarian trainings, internship opportunities at NGOs and apprenticeship opportunities at small to medium enterprises. The project also aims at providing parent education sessions and development of community referral pathways to establish community based child protection mechanisms; as well as creating various awareness campaigns.

Up to date, 53 facilitators of mixed nationalities (Lebanese, Syrians and Iraqis) have completed the trainings and are divided among the six centers to train 633 beneficiaries so far.

This project takes a community based approach, and hopes to build on the very successful youth led community activities that were conducted under the JPF in 2013, which provided training to 1975 beneficiaries. The youth who were part of these projects said that the centers became a safe place for them to meet and interact with youth from various backgrounds, helping them to get rid of their prejudices towards each other and start building lasting friendships across the different groups. In addition, some of the youth stated that they became happier, more fulfilled and felt they had started to realize their potential through volunteering or becoming facilitators for some of the classes they have been previously attending.

So far, the project has been successfully bringing various communities together, and providing youth with experiences and skills that will support them in building their lives and contributing positively to their futures and those of their communities.