Time flies when you’re having fun. This saying quite accurately describes our week in Yogyakarta. It’s been a full-on week, and before we knew it, it’s already Friday. Everybody started to feel the nerves about our final presentation. As we all were aware, our 6th day in the seminar marks our chance to showcase what we’ve been working on the past five days, and impress the judges with our 30-minute presentation pitch.
Five teams, namely Team Creatix (creative economy), Team SANA (digital citizenship), Team Sexy Seminar (shaping identity), Team Popular (political populism), and Team Talent (talent development) got together first thing in the morning to sum up our final proposals before presenting them to the panel of judges. After a few cups of coffees and plates of snacks later, the clock strikes 3 in the afternoon, marking our deadline for submission of final PowerPoint slides and written reports.
Despite the butterflies in our tummy and some unexpected technical glitches (there were power outages during one of the team’s presentation), all the five teams successfully delivered solid final presentations before the two board members of Frans Seda Foundation, Steve Ginting and Dolf Huijgers. Lively questions and answers were exchanged during the sessions as well, both by board members and fellow seminar participants.
In their presentation, Team Creatix proposed a dual internship program as a solution to fill in the gap in Indonesia’s creative economy by bringing in young talents from Dutch universities to work simultaneously in two organizations in Indonesia; one big commercial company in the creative sector and one small social enterprise. Team SANA proposed to build a digital community where everyone can contribute towards bringing positive and constructive environment in the digital world. Team Sexy Seminar initiated a project called Widentity to help guide youngsters to become self-aware global citizens. Team Popular addressed the issue of political populism in Indonesia and the Netherlands, and came up with a recommendation of what can be done to change people’s perspective on diversity, from fear to respect. And finally, last but not least, Team Talent introduced an initiative of entrepreneurship education for underprivileged children through #akupengusaha project.
Five different teams. Five different ideas. But we notice one common goal in all of our final presentations; that is how we can try and create a positive impact to the world by promoting global citizenship. And that is principally the theme and the main reason why we are here this year, in Frans Seda Foundation Seminar 2017.
After spending 6 days together, we were amazed at how much we learnt from each other. But most of all, we all learnt that at the end, just like Mr Frans Seda himself, open-mindedness and compassion are the combination needed to be global citizens.