MAIN SPEECH

We are proud to present Valentin Vollmer, Founder and President of IDEM (Identity Through Initiative - a platform for people to unfold their true potential to contribute towards society) and an impressive young change maker as our main speaker. He has extensive experience in the field of global change and will explain to us what he has learned so far and give us hints as to how new global change makers are born.

Already when still in High School, 16 years of age, Valentin participated in his first project in Brazil, building a community centre in a favela as well as a fresh water pipeline for a small fisher-village. Ever since he stayed involved in many youth projects, mainly organizing those in Brazil, Senegal, Ireland and Tanzania.

During his studies of Social Work in Cologne he received a scholarship of the „Friedrich Ebert Stiftung“ and did research about the background of Work Camps and youth initiative in general, leading to his final thesis „Identity Development in the Age of Globalisation“, which has been published in a number of articles. Consequently he was a co-founder of the international youth network „IDEM – Identity through Initiative“ and organized, among other events, the 800 people youth conference „Connectivity – from thinking to action“ in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is working full time with IDEM , which is serving as a platform for young people to get active and only in the last year helped over 500 to do so!

As an ambassador of the World Wisdom Council, founded by the Club of Budapest, Valentin has the chance to connect grass root youth work with networking with people like Jane Goodall on a global level.

Currently he is about to set up a new youth information and project centre in the middle of Basal, called Connect Café Basel in order to be able to reach out to even more youth.

“My main goal really is to help overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed and see the opportunities we are having!”