Shillong: Award-winning serial entrepreneur and founder-CEO of Shillong-based AVENUES, Mark Laitflang Stone, will be attending the Australia-India Youth Dialogue (AIYD) 2022.
The youth dialogue will be held in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia from May 31 to June 4.
Laitflang will join 14 other Indian delegates, making him the lone representative from the northeast and the first ever from Meghalaya to attend the international 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.
The 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 that 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 last 10 years, the conference has seen the participation of close to 300 youth leaders from both nations.
As northeast India’s leading personal excellence social enterprise, AVENUES, under Mark’s leadership over the past 19 years, has impacted the lives of over one lakh youths through soft skills training programmes .
At a time when skilling programmes across the country offer mass-scale, standardized trade-specific trainings with the goal to recruit, train and deploy youth in jobs at an exacting pace, AVENUES became the first to pioneer in providing career preparedness interventions and soft skills training programmes.
Over the last few years, there has been an increase in entrepreneurial aspirations among the youth of the State wherein they have started to embrace the culture of start-ups and grassroots enterprises. However, the state needs an ecosystem in order to support aspiring entrepreneurs, young business leaders and youth.
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.
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