Kunsill Nazzjonali taż-Żgħażagħ (KNZ)’s most recently elected Executive Board, serving for the term 2016/2018 has just celebrated its first year of hard work for the benefit of the youth it represents. On this occassion, The Third Eye team spoke to KNZ’s President Michael Piccinino about the achievements, challenges, plans and valuable qualities of the current team.
1. Considering your involvement in previous KNZ Executive Board, what, in your opinion, makes this current Executive Team particular?
I believe that every Board is particular in its own way.This current KNZ Executive is particular in a sense because it is united under a single aim of working to push forward youth rights and opportunities. We are aiming to always do more activities and widen our activites to reach more youth with different interests as well as work with more organisations which fall under our representation.
2. What would you say has been the most successful and fruitful event organised by KNZ in this past year?
This year we have organised a number of events most of which are new to the KNZ executive so it is very difficult to mention 1 event which I believe was the most successful and fruitful. However, 3 events which we have done and I particularly enjoyed from my end were ’Actors of Change’; where we had almost 90 youths in 1 place giving their opinion on a number of topics and the ’National Youth Technology and Innovation Fair’ which was held in Valletta a few days ago whereby youth technological organisations and start ups could showcase their work to fellow youth who attended the fair. Finally, as always we organised the National Youth Parliament which gives an opportunity to a number of youth to come up with proposals about topics they care about which are debated in the Youth Parliament and than forwarded to the President. Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition.
3. How would you describe the team under your leadership in three words?
- Energetic– all the team has a lot of energy to push forward our ideas to provide more opportunities for youth representation in every sector of society.
- Diverse– we all come from different backgrounds and different organisations which nominated us which sometimes might seem at first to have different views which might sometimes be contradictory and most importantly
- United– we are working as one team putting aside our own agendas and priorities to push forward the aims of the Council.
4. What projects and events are in store for the upcoming year?
There are a lot of ideas for projects and events in the upcoming years. We are organising ’Raise your Voice’ on the 15th of September which will focus on the topic of racism. We will have artists performing at the events and we will also be releasing a policy document on the subject. Our flagship event, the National Youth Parliament is also soon approaching. We also plan to hold a conference on the results of the EU Presidency. Also we will soon have our planning weekend in which we will plan much more events for the following year. Anyone who is interested in keeping updated with our events should follow us on facebook were we post regular updates about out activities.
The Third Eye team would like to thank President, Michael Piccinino for his time and wish another fruitful year to the whole KNZ Eexuctive.
