Making Strides of Progress with YGL Initiatives

Jennifer Corriero is co-founder and executive director TakingITGlobal, Canada. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on Youth Unemployment. She is guest blogging from the Annual Meeting of the New Champions. 

There is always a buzzing sense of excitement that I feel when preparing for the start of any event with the Young Global Leaders (YGL) community.  Since my involvement began in 2005, I have grown to expect that each encounter is likely to result in a profound new sense of understanding that I gain on the world and my role within it.  These moments of insight are what I look forward to gaining while in Dalian, China at both the YGL Annual Summit and the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions. 

At our last YGL Summit in Tanzania 2010, I shared a poem titled ‘How Does Change Happen?’ with the group that catalyzed a series of discussions on models of change.  Here is a link to the YGL Field Guide that was developed as a result of our interactions with a compilation of various visuals and approaches to how change happens.  It also includes the text of the poem.

Since Tanzania, I have been working collaboratively with many YGLs to develop the Youth Effect: A Toolkit for Decision-Makers on Engaging with Youth (http://www.youtheffect.org).  We had our pre-launch in Dubai on the Summit on the Global Agenda where the book was acknowledged by the Next Generation Global Agenda Council, and the official launch was in July 2011 at the UN High Level Meeting on Youth that took place in New York.  This undertaking has helped to bring the critical importance of youth engagement to the forefront of the World Economic Forum and also contributed to the thinking behind the new Global Shapers community!

Earlier this year, Professor Schwab developed a strategy in consultation with many YGLs and representatives from other constituencies to create 100 hubs of youth in their 20’s based in cities around the world who have high potential for future leadership.  Many YGLs have been selected as Founding Curators and over the summer the recruitment and selection process for Global Shapers has been underway.  I am really looking forward to supporting the development of the Global Shapers community both as the curator in Toronto and as a support for the global network.  I believe that this major new undertaking will create a powerful and important platform for young people to connect more meaningfully to the different communities of the World Economic Forum and hope that new intergenerational connections will be formed.

This week, while here in Dalian, I look forward to having opportunities to share these areas of progress at our YGL meetings and also hope to reflect more deeply on how our various YGL initiatives can have an even greater impact on the world!

As a final thought, I would like to share the text of a manifesto that I put together with my team at TakingITGlobal as part of a new project we have launched called YouthMovements.org:   

The Declaration of Interdependence

We are connected.
We are many.
We all dream of a better world.

The pace of chance is accelerating and the challenges we face are more global and complex than ever before.
New ways of thinking and working collaboratively are needed to address these issues.
We must work inclusively across cultures, organizations, and networks, to champion the role of youth.

We will challenge old paradigms, move beyond divisions, and hold our leaders accountable.

We can harness technology to co-create a peaceful, sustainable planet for all.

Together, we will help to grow the next generation of leaders; enabling them to change the world.