CHANGEMAKERS SPOTLIGHT

Colombian changemaker Camila Peña is a former YouthLead Ambassador who believes real change starts with positive communications. She recently spoke with YouthLead about how she used social media to communicate important messages to her community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here, we are sharing how she and her fellow young leaders helped feed 2,000 people in our Changemakers Spotlight.

YouthLead Team: What are a couple of things that you have found as you've grown as a leader that are good skills to have?

Camila Peña: It’s good to be open-minded and to be open to work with other people. It doesn’t matter that we are not in the same place or in the same culture or even the same language … [Also], making people feel like they are a part of what you are doing. That is very important.

YouthLead: How did you first hear about becoming a YouthLead Ambassador?

Camila: Well, I had been working with USAID programs before so I'm always like checking their media page, their web page, and also in the media and on the social media, and that's how I started following what the YouthLead platform is doing all around the world.

YouthLead: Did you find that the social campaigns [you did for safety awareness around COVID-19] were really effective? Social media seems to be really such a good tool to reach young people and there's so many things that you can do, especially with how you were talking about those visual elements. Instead of reading it, they can see photos or videos of hand-washing and such. Was your engagement good?

Camila: Well, actually, yes. It was really good … Schools started promoting activities to do at home to develop art. Like for example, using a lot of tutorials of things that you could do yourself at your house or with your family … We also started donating lunch boxes for two thousand people each day for four months. The young people were the ones who were coordinating the delivery of these lunch boxes. You start thinking, OK, how can deliver 2,000 lunches and be safe? Because, [otherwise], it would start gathering 2,000 people. So what we decided was to deliver them house-by-house. These were volunteers that wanted to help their community. We have this phrase that it's better together and together and we can do it.