YouthKiAwaaz.com (http://www.youthkiawaaz.com), is an online platform for young people to express themselves on issues of critical importance. We make use of social media and online journalism skills to mobilize and engage young people in participatory and collaborative journalism for education, social change and development.

If we wish to move forward and become socially developed - change is important. Awareness is the first step towards change. If people don't know about the issues - they would not be able to contribute to the change wholeheartedly. Awareness comes when people voice themselves and spread the word about these issues. Thus, change starts when people speak up.

In 2008, I (the Founder) felt the need to voice myself on whatever was happening around me. I saw critical problems being born and nothing being done about them. I saw social evils grow, and not many people acting or even knowing about them. I wanted to speak up and approached the mainstream media. Evident from its reports, the mainstream media has not been giving much importance to the views of the young generation on current national and international issues, and I faced the same rejection. Moreover, the reports are at times biased and sensational to serve the personal interests of some, while running the race for viewrship and readership. On further research, I found out that youth, at large, did not have an outlet to voice themselves, learn about issues, spread awareness and collaborate for positive action.

Thus, in 2008, Youth Ki Awaaz was born. The mission of YouthKiAwaaz.com is to be voice and ears to a large unheard youth community that fails to reach out to a mass audience when they raise their voices individually. Media as a fourth estate has failed miserably, the need now is to equip the everyday citizen with education about local, national and international issues, journalistic tools and abilities to create a better and more importantly, freer, citizen media outlet for the people to voice themselves. Since young people hold the key to development, a youth driven citizen media can, in literal sense, change the way people perceive or deal with issues. It can lead to creation of a more responsible and vocal future generation.

Reaching nearly over 2 million young people every month, YouthKiAwaaz.com is arguably India’s largest issue-based-youth-platform. Our concept is based on the fact that young urban audience has the capacity and ability to move out of their comfort zone and start social impact projects that affect the grass roots – thus, we sensitize this section of the society.

Youth Ki Awaaz (YKA) also runs one of India's most popular online journalism work-from-home internship program that educates and equips about 30 young participants in online journalism skills, social media for social good, and skills to address critical issues in the best possible manner - every month. YKA is run and managed by a team of dedicated volunteer editors who sift through the content that goes on the platform, and also train the young participants of the internship program, continuously mentoring them throughout the 2 month process.

The platform was awarded the UN and ICNM run World Summit Youth Award in 2010 for best practices in Online journalism and e-content. In October 2011, the platform was also awarded and recognized as a Champion of Social Transformation for its efforts towards youth empowerment by the Baha'i Foundation.

We also run the Youth Action Center (http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/action/), which is a peer-to-peer networking and mentoring center and online space to start and establish social good projects and initiatives. The core concept here is peer-to-peer learning.

SOME FIGURES:

1) The platform receives over 2 million user impressions every month,
2) The internship program was launched in January 2010, and till date we have trained over 1000 young participants.
3) Youth Ki Awaaz has given voice to over 10000 youths from India and the world.
4) Till date, the platform has engaged and educated over 10 million young people throughout the past 3 years.

India, a developing nation and the world’s largest democracy, has one of the largest youth populace in the world. However, being the second largest population makes it all the more difficult for people of this emerging democracy to express themselves freely at a large scale. Continuous bias by the mainline media and tampering of news values has further created a large divide between people and real, credible information. Participation of the citizen in decision making and addressing of issues has disappeared. The need really is to create a people powered alternative media platform which gives every citizen and non-citizen to address critical issues freely, making best use of journalism and emerging technologies. With such an alternative platform at hand, it shall become easier to reach out to a large youth populace of over 200 million, and empower them with the correct, credible information, free from bias and create a better understanding of issues that affect the nation, and build constructive solutions.

"Youth Ki Awaaz" which literally translates to voice of the youth in English, is an online platform for the youth to express themselves on issues of critical importance. The mission is to be voice & ears to a large unheard youth community that fails to reach out to a mass audience when they raise their voices. We help them reach out to other like-minded people, to work on constructive solutions for global concerns by making best use of social media tools & online journalism skills – mobilizing & engaging young people in participatory and collaborative journalism. It needs to be understood that the urban educated youth has the power to change the way issues have been addressed in the past. Thus combining the dynamism of the youth with the power of journalism and new media to create compelling content that reaches out to a mass audience in order to create awareness, is one of the best uses of citizen media for development. We make use of various crowd sourcing and citizen journalism based models to make sure our beneficiaries play an important role in creation of content. We run a work-from-home, online journalism internship program, that mentors about 30 young participants every month in online journalism and new media skills, and engages them in reporting, content writing, research and much more. The aim of this internship is to get the participants to talk about critical issues and in the process gain and spread awareness about the same. Our another writers programs empowers every reader to contribute their views on various topics and join us as journalists.

Young people in India are often left unheard. It is an integral aim of YouthKiAwaaz.com to bridge this gap by making best use of internet and mobile technology. 1) YouthKiAwaaz.com, the online platform, is a host to thousands of views by young people on various critical local and global issues. The aim of the portal is to create a citizen media based outlet for young people to express themselves on these issues and work on constructive solutions. We strongly believe that creating the right kind of awareness is the first step towards change - and YouthKiAwaaz.com is hitting the nail with content and technology. 2) Unlike the traditional media formats of television and newspaper, where the media talks to the audience, and not vice-versa, our model enables ease of interaction, creating a two-way flow for both the writer and the reader. We recently launched our Nokia app and are now working on an iPhone and Android app to enable citizen journalism through mobile. 3) Our internship program trains & equips young people with adequate communication and journalism skills to report on, & address critical issues. The program has been recognized by the International Center for New Media, Austria. The program helps the participants improve their skills and also makes them aware of various problems they would not have thought of otherwise. Similarly, our writers program enables anyone & everyone to be a part of the awareness-generation process. 4) Our pan India reach enables us to take up exclusive, hyper local issues which are usually unnoticed by the mainline media.

Even though there are many citizen journalism portals around the world, very few of them focus on views, and none who focus on constructive action towards societal good. We maintain our focus towards: 1) Educating young people about critical issues and how they affect them, 2) Views based reporting, 3) Continuous youth empowerment, 4) Training and educating young people on how to have a voice and an impact, 5) Strategically engaging with policy makers to help young people take constructive actions to the next level, and 6) Organizing educational workshops on entrepreneurship, journalism, youth activism, etc. to empower young people with the right knowledge. 7) Our innovation also lies in creation of collaborative platforms for social change, and we are working on a mobile application to enable education and awareness from anywhere on the planet.