Date: 2017-07-28

As mentioned, this week’s topic is public relations. Public relations can be in form of community relations, public affairs, investor relations, employee relations, customer relations, other stakeholder relations, and so on.  When referring to public relations, for organization or company, it is a strategic communication process that helps manage, protect, and enhance the reputation of an organization, its members, and its services. However, our scope for this week training is community relations. The experience in the field guest speaker Ms. Sem Chenda who works closely with community and performs various community services introduced youth about the definition of public relations with the community.

“Public relations is the communication for effective advocacy. It is to connect to the public for our voice to be heard, to pressure the public to agree on particular issue or idea or to change the behavior of something.”, explained the guest speaker. She also added that in order to have effective public relations, we need to choose the tools wisely whether it’s social media, ICT platform, dialogue, forum, campaign, awareness, training, workshop, systematic education, or traditional tool which is word of mouth. After gaining the understanding of public relations, the guest speaker also inserted some knowledge on advocacy and good governance. “To advocate is to find support, we set goal, and want to reach our goal. Hitting the real target is the most effective way in getting the support and so does advocacy. In order to advocate, we need to find who has real power since there are three types of power which are physical power, hidden power, and abstract power.”, she added. Another important lesson that youth got to learn was good governance criteria. They learned that good governance requires the active participation and commitment from all segments of the society, enhanced information sharing, accountability, transparency, equality, inclusiveness, and the rule of law. Good governance also requires voice and contribution from youth since youth plays a vital role in order to achieve sustainable economic development with equity and social justice. The training was done with a remarkable knowledge sharing and mutual discussion from our youth as well as the guest speaker. We will continue with the last but not least topic of the training which is Project Management to be held on August 05, 2017. Stay tune for another very important to learn topic!