The Global Youth Action Network (GYAN) is an international network of youth NGOs spanning 180 countries, and headquartered in New York, near the United Nations. GYAN is a youth-led not for profit organization (registered in 2001, New York, under section 5013) that incubates global partnerships and increases youth participation in decision-making. GYAN has registered chapters in Brazil, Colombia, France, Ghana, Mexico, and South Africa, with teams working out of an additional eight countries.
GYAN is known for co-coordinating Global Youth Service Day, a program of Youth Service America, since its launch in 2000. These have grown into the world's largest annual celebration of young volunteers, with millions of participants. The organization has also worked to increase youth participation and channel youth voices into policy-making at international institutions, such as the United Nations, where it holds Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and Affiliate Status with the Department of Public Information.
GYAN catalogs and helps to connect youth groups to each other, to information, resources and opportunities that empower their work for social change. Membership is open to any organization that does not promote hatred or violence towards others, and that is youth-led, youth-serving or youth-friendly. GYAN's 600 member organizations help determine future priorities for the Network, working to implement a "5-Level Model of Effective Youth Organizing", based on Integral theory and 10 years of organizing experience.
Through a partnership with TakingITGlobal, an active Internet community of student organizers, vounteers and activitists, GYAN has helped to catalog more than 10,000 youth organizations on-line. GYAN's YouthLinkExpress e-newsletter reaches tens of thousands of subscribing individuals, institutions and leaders in the youth development and other sectors.
Read more about Global Youth Action Network: Mission, Vision, Programs, History, Hoaxes
Famous quotes containing the words global, youth, action and/or network:
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“The Oriental philosophy approaches easily loftier themes than the modern aspires to; and no wonder if it sometimes prattle about them. It only assigns their due rank respectively to Action and Contemplation, or rather does full justice to the latter. Western philosophers have not conceived of the significance of Contemplation in their sense.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)