Venturing back to work

BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- Newey is the head of Thailand's Youth Venture program, located in Bangkok.

Youth Venture, a global organization and partner of Ashoka, is dedicated to supporting and encouraging Ventures that benefit society, proposed and run by young people across Thailand. The vision behind the program is that everyone can take initiative and address social needs. Young people form the basis for this.

Newey will be continuing her work with the program to further the impact it is having on Bangkok society. Follow her efforts in her blogs and video diaries.

January 14, 2008
I'm back in Bangkok, back to our warm Youth Venture Thailand office. After one full month (December) in the United States (New York, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota and one day in Atlanta visiting CNN headquarters), I had a chance to learn from the Youth Venture team at our global team meeting and get involved with the program in Minneapolis.

Repeatedly I was inspired by stories of young people that launched their venture with us and really felt excited about the work I have been doing. Especially the story of the collaboration of Matt (Seattle), Jenny (DC) and Verneet (India), who met on www.genv.net and are now helping each other on their projects.

Also I experienced my first white Christmas, which was quite overwhelming, along with the food and shopping and magic of being with family.

Back at the Bangkok office, we started New Year with a fun activity, the first Youth Venture Staff Challenge.

Everyone on the team was given the task of designing merchandise that we could sell for fund raising, or to give to youth to encourage them that they're also able to create positive change. We created a T-shirt, dreamer kit, planner and stationery.

Kiang won this challenge with his design of a pencil and eraser. "With pencil," he said, "you can create. One side will say "dream it" and as time goes by the more we sharpen the words "dream it" off and we counting down number like our dream may fade way until the end it says "do it." For the eraser is to represent that you can change, can erase mistakes or get rid of problem."

Also we did review of our work in 2007 and we learned that we should improve our communication plan to reach out to youth that need the opportunity to start a project, and to challenge youth who are interested in making a difference, but don't know what they can do or how to take the first step.

We're very excited about two trips to visit youth projects that we're supporting soon. One in Nan (in the north, 10 hours from Bangkok), which is about making a documentary about the river, and one in Ubon (in the northeast, nine hours from Bangkok) to start a project to promote student participation in Ubon University. E-mail to a friend