1. To the Asian Youth Friendship Network (AYFN),

The AYFN is a community telling that they aim to build friendship network, thus organizing cultural camps and bringing young people from different societies together. This organization’s scholarship shemes, require three different stages to pass. Hundreds of young people all over the world apply to the scholarship scheme to fulfill their dreams. The first stage requires personal information, a motivation letter and also 15 USD for the application. If we consider that there are 800 people applying, there will be 12.000 USD in total. So, of course most of the people who applied passed the first round because it would be odd if they didn’t let people pass after having provided the payment. The second stage was the strangest one for many reasons. We all got informed by an e-mail, they said it required a video for youtube which should be “Public accessible” and also that they will evaluate the numbers of the views and the likes of the Youtube video. Why would they want to see more likes and views on a video for evaluation? Why would AYFN use young people for advertising to gain more attention and designation? However, after many people having resisted for the video criteria, AYFN decided to change the video criteria into; quality of the video, creativity, english proficiency and public speaking skill. This is not so relevant because on their official site (ayfnhg.org) their overview of this cultural camp says “Prior knowledge of English is not required for students to participate in this program.” And this is exactly why they conflict with themselves. Moreover, the number of participants who will finally be selected for the camp were not told by AYFN, which is again a strategy they use to make more money. Only 15 people were selected for the third round which is very very few, considering that there were hundreds of participants. Suddenly hundreds of participants were eliminated without any message nor notification. Herewith I strongly censure AYFN and the AYFN Team who is responsible at the organization of the selection processes. The network is said to be a friendship network, but all I see is tradership through young people.

If you want to make change for future participants at this organization,

If you want to save true FRIENDSHIP, please give your support.