Our Mission and Vision
We undertake massive global consultations of young people to share their opinions, concerns and aspirations for the future.
By distilling vast amount of shared content into comprehensible and actionable insights, we engage with multiple stakeholders to bring the voices of the world’s youth to the attention of organisations and decision makers that shape our societies.
The mission of Youth Talks is to bring the voices of the world's youth to the attention of organizations and decision-makers and to influence their actions to better meet the needs and aspirations of young people.
76% of tomorrow’s young leaders believe the older generation ignores their vital interests, and 50% of senior leaders agree. The last decade has been primarily marked by disagreements between generations on a growing number of subjects: environmental protections, globalisation, new technologies and their impact, social protections, labour conditions, and the growth of income inequality. To find solutions to the world’s most urgent problems, such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and health and migration crises, it is imperative to learn to listen to each other, restore dialogue, and better collaborate to meet these challenges.
Youth Talks is the largest-ever global consultation inviting people aged 15-29 to share their opinions, concerns and aspirations for the future. Launched in 2022, the project was initiated by the Higher Education for Good Foundation.
From the outset, the development of Youth Talks has been participant-led, based on extensive engagement with young people. The project uses state-of-the-art A.I. technology to analyse responses, enabling contributors to answer open-ended questions in thoughtful, nuanced ways and distilling vast amounts of shared content into rich, comprehensible and actionable insights.
Depending on the continents, regions, countries, communities or socio-economic categories they belong to, young people have different expectations, ambitions and needs. The Youth Talks Online platform allows young people to express themselves through written text, voice recordings and image uploads. This multi-faceted, multi-media approach encourages diversity and inclusion by broadening the initiative’s reach and proximity.
Youth Talks is the first consultation of its kind in terms of methodology and results. This first edition has already received approximately 1,000,000 contributions from more than 45,000 young people in 212 countries and territories. Today, the initiative engages with more than 55 partners, including the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), as well as top universities, world youth organisations, and political institutions.
The new Youth Talks Ambassadors Network includes 2 300 young people from every region of the world who actively support and promote the project in their communities.
We seek a world where young people’s voices are heard and have an impact on shaping a sustainable future.
Youth Talks is a tool for change, destined to become the largest international youth forum. By 2026, it is estimated that over a million young people will express their views through the platform, and some 50 000 Ambassadors will take the initiative into their communities. Young people will be able to participate in several ways:
- Virtual engagement via the Youth Talks platform, responding to open-ended questions, engaging in creative self-expression, and taking part in conversation forums.
- In-person engagement, overseen by the various Youth Talks chapters (one chapter per world region), including Ambassador-led workshops and events organised around themes of local interest identified by the young people themselves.
The results of the consultations will be communicated through various methods, including an online platform, adapted to the realities of the target stakeholders: programme content proposals for educational institutions, data sets for academic researchers, reports for companies, white papers for governments, or art exhibitions for the general public. These tailor-made outputs increase the potential impact on each stakeholder in specific
ways: educational institutions companies, governments and political institutions, youth/education organisations, media and the general public.
Youth Talks aspires to be an essential conduit between what young people want and actionable societal change. Its unique approach is organised around two important axes:
- Offering young people a safe space for self expression, allowing them to share with the rest of the world what is important to them on different topics without being locked into a single thought or existing models. The questions that are asked on the platform are open-ended without a choice of predefined answers, and the multiple methods of participation (writing, voice recording, uploading images, etc.) promote diversity and inclusion. In addition, the consultation is being conducted in numerous languages, including French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese.
- Using cutting-edge A.I. tools to digest the information collected and produce concise, relevant deliverables adapted for different stakeholders, including educational institutions, youth organisations, governments, companies, the media or the general public.
Moving forward, the initiative will focus on several components to further its impact. The ultimate goal is for leaders in every part of the world to draw on these insights as they make decisions.
Youth Talk’s Action Strategy:
- An Empowering Platform: A dynamic and attractive platform for young people, with a format that allows for engagement and free expression.
- State-of-the-art A.I. tools: Using the latest technologies to transform the information gathered into actionable results for stakeholders and to manage the contributions from participants and the communities formed.
- Robust regional deployment: Youth Talks chapters will be set up in different regions of the world. These chapters, managed mainly by Ambassadors, will aim to reflect local communities, offering face-to-face activities and events such as forums, conferences and festivals.
Committed partnerships: For the first edition of Youth Talks, over 55 partners contributed to our communication and mobilisation drive, reaching out to young people. More and stronger partnerships will be needed to expand the initiative’s reach.
