Shillong, May 7: Award-winning serial entrepreneur and Founder-CEO of Shillong-based AVENUES, Mark Laitflang Stone, has become the first person from Meghalaya to be selected to attend the Australia India Youth Dialogue (AIYD) 2022, which will be held at Sydney and Melbourne, Australia from May 31 to June 4.
He along with 14 other Indian delegates will attend the international conference. He is also the lone representation from North-East India this year for the conference.
Established in 2012, AIYD is a Track II bilateral dialogue which brings together 30 young leaders from Australia and India each year to discuss issues important to both countries. A key objective of the youth-led conference is to foster people-to-people links, embrace cultural and multidimensional diversity, and encourage a youth leadership community which will steer and strengthen the bilateral relationship. The annually-held dialogue has received letters of support from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The patron of AIYD is the Governor General, His Excellency, David Hurley. Over the course of the last 10 years, the conference has seen the participation of close to 300 youth leaders from both nations.
As North East India’s leading personal excellence social enterprise, Avenues has, under Mark’s leadership over the course of the last 19 years, impacted the lives of over 100,000 youths through powerful interventions that build confidence, emotional resilience and aspiration. At a time when skilling programs across the country offer mass-scale, standardised, trade-specific trainings with the goal to recruit, train and deploy youth in jobs at an exacting pace, and that do not account for the holistic wellbeing that young people need to navigate through volatile job landscapes, Avenues became the first to pioneer career preparedness interventions and soft skills training programmes delivered through safe spaces that inspire curious mindsets and self-awareness of their potential roles as leaders driven by purpose in an uncertain world.
North-East India, at large, has witnessed a growing number of young leaders venturing into the entrepreneurship space, and building teams from local and regional talent. Having a delegate from Meghalaya representing the entire region at the conference this year may be seen as an opportunity to showcase the enterprising nature of its youth, and a catalyst for prospective collaborations with the region’s own network of home-grown youth leaders, resulting in the mutual prosperity of the two countries.
It may be mentioned that Mark Laitflang Stone is the recipient of the inaugural Leaders Connect’s ‘Northeast Young Heroes Award for Education’, 2020 and the ‘AsiaOne Asian Youth Empowerment Leader Award’, 2021.
