Laura Sacks' Y20 Adventure - Turkey 2015

Laura Sacks' Y20 Adventure

Thursday 20 August 2015

Nearly there…

The last few months between the Canberra pre-departure briefings and leaving for Turkey have been unsurprisingly busy. There was a lot to juggle between getting through final assessments and exams, the Y20 preparation and of course planning my pre-summit travels!
Turkey's mineral water spa - Pamukkale "Cotton Castle"

On the Global Voices end, all of the Australian delegates have been working hard on our research papers and opinion articles. We’ve been lucky to receive 2 rounds of draft feedback from our Global Voices Co-ordinator, Nick Fabbri, and our Academic advisors Tristram Sainsbury and Mike Callaghan. The experience of these 3 contributors was invaluable in shaping my research to be more relevant and impactful.

During the development of my paper, I also found an International Science & Engineering conference that will be held in Istanbul 2 days before the Y20 summit and thought that it was too convenient to not apply! I was very excited to be accepted to present my research there, and have therefore also prepared a slightly adjusted version of my Y20 paper for publication – adding to the pre lift-off chaos!

Birds-eye view over Fethiye
On the external Y20 end, all G20 Youth delegates were assigned a Y20 email address and Yammer (professional social networking site) account. These, along with Facebook, have been used extensively to get to know delegates from around the world and pre-arrange social meet ups for before, during and after the trip. On the professional side, we were all active in putting forward our countries’ position on the main youth issues for Yammer discussion and then voting for the top agenda items. The three main headings within this are youth and education in the 21st century, youth for peace and youth unemployment across technology and innovation. Given my interest and research into innovation, I am the Australian delegate in the last discussion group, although currently we are all contributing across the board. With 2 rounds of voting and in depth discussion, it is shaping up to be a really diverse and interesting agenda for negotiation at the actual Y20 summit in Istanbul shortly!

We have been receiving exciting updates about our itinerary for Turkey, which includes 2 full days of negotiation as well as communiqué development. We also have cultural day trips and evenings as well as a gala dinner event – I can’t wait!
The honeycomb hills of Cappadocia


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