‘Supporting Ocean Literacy in the Baltic - ‘Let’s make the Baltic Sea Blue’!

Members of the Youth4Ocean Forum were invited to participate and actively contributed in 3 sessions:

• The Baltic Young Ocean Advocate Pitching Contest where selected Young Ocean Advocates presented 5 projects.  70+ participants attended. Po bangom, a Lithuanian project won both the jury’s vote (consisting of three high level representatives from across the Baltic Sea region) as well as the public vote.  Click Here to discover more Young Ocean Advocates.
• The Youth Perspective on Ocean Literacy  workshop, attended by 70+ participants as well. The workshop included a discussion about how Baltic citizens and stakeholders can become more ocean literate and how Baltic Youth can be brought in closer contact with ocean professionals. Both the Baltic Youth representatives and the involved ocean professionals had sent in their questions to each other ahead of time - and during the moderated session, their answers were elaborated. 
• How to engage and empower the Youth in the Baltic Sea Region workshop. During this interactive session, 14 participants shared their experience of the Youth4Ocean forum and other youth activities in the region. They discussed the areas/topics, project types that were (and would be) important for youth engagement in the Baltic area in the future, and where special efforts should be taken to take these to the next level. The session was centred around a highly active discussion, including three Baltic Youth representatives as well as Baltic ocean professionals. 

For the organisation of this event, synergies were developed with other youth networks such as the European Youth Capital 2021 in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and Friends of the Earth Russia.

Some of the key take aways are : keep connecting youth and professionals bilaterally , plan for future ocean jobs, fight the myths- things are often more complicated than they seem, and the importance of the COP26 Climate conference.