Amplifying Youth-Led Change
A bit of context…
This is one of Unstitution’s (7) overarching societal coalition living lab themes.
Each theme is multi-layered and multi-faceted, toward co-catalyzing, supporting and building upon many people already working diligently to advance important work.
With overlapping synergies between and among us, we can spawn wider and deeper, connecting and fortifying multitudes of efforts and initiatives — toward life-affirming patterns that can helps us all.
Unstitution’s driving theme and purpose can serve as an integrative support, potentially amplifying the work of many others. A reciprocal and symbiotic interdependence is at play. Over time — and beyond our own work and lifetimes — we can collectively contribute to rebooting society’s operating system. Activating shifts toward flourishing on a finite planet needs us all with gifts differing reconstituting the commons in a variety of ways.
Patterned as a collaborative commons, we can contribute to the integrity and resilience of any and all initiatives within and across our nested and interconnected ecosystems.
Theme descriptions are not carved in stone. Since initiatives spawn organically and by design, we’re always adaptively balancing strategy thinking with co-creative emergent learning. As people co-catalyze and engage, we’ll collectively shape and adapt the trajectory in more granular and tangible context-based and place-sourced ways that bring it to life.
Overview…yeah it’s complex and complicated…but we gotta cut through…
There are many overlapping and layered issues, challenges and opportunities.
Young people will inherit the future. They are here now…getting ready.
They are the ones who will be around farther down the road.
They’ll be living with the consequences of all that came before, and all the possibilities that are realized — or not.
It’s only right and reasonable that they play pivotal roles crafting the new stories, equipping themselves for the journey forward — engaging front and centre — sharing their voices, their experiences, their fears and their dreams.
We have much to learn from those who are young, who grew up in the digital age and see the world through fresh eyes.
The young have much to learn too, but current formal educational and learning systems are generally not designed for (trans)contextual experiences, awareness and skill-building that will prepare and support people for the tectonic changes underway in our world.
A cool opportunity actually…to experiment and amplify impact with:
🔮 Multimodal ways of learning
🔮 Building resilience
🔮 Building true community
Many young people are already well aware of the encroaching and impending crises affecting our planet.
Many already get game be…without needing to know the lingo and some of the conceptual underpinnings.
They are living it…or trying to…
Many are already making different choices about their life priorities, lifestyles and work focus.
Like many younger generations before, they are not buying into the old established societal conventions.
They are awake to the reality that the old paradigm is not working. They are seeking and pushing for alternatives.
Contrasted with earlier generations who rebelled or resisted, and adopted counter culture norms:
🔮 The era of generation me is (necessarily) shifting to generation be
🔮 Quality of life and work and adaptability are gaining in importance and value over materialism
🔮 There is growing awareness about climate and the interconnected implications for all life on the planet
🔮 The stakes are much higher.
This offers living lab testing grounds to help shape alternative learning ecosystems, engaging youth in real world problems in creative and fun ways.
Our Amplifying Youth-Led Change coalition theme brings a wide range of cross sector organizations, institutions and initiatives together, including:
🔮 Universities and colleges undertaking new curriculum building
🔮 Community projects anywhere in the world that support youth leadership, agency, learning and creative activation
🔮 Engaging youth in climate and regenerative/restoration development projects that incorporate creative arts and culture
🔮 Addressing the layered mental health challenges affecting youth such as loneliness, depression, apathy and eco-anxiety
🔮 Storymaking and storytelling
🔮 Building cross-generational collaboration
This coalition theme has synergistic links to our other overarching themes:
⚙️ Linking to our Elementally Sustaining People & Planet: Earth, Fire, Water, Air coalition through — Initiatives that fund and support a range of regenerative and sustainability initiatives towards positive impact on natural and built environments, community resilience and climate issues.
⚙️ Linking to our Justice-Led Social Wellbeing coalition through — Initiatives that fund and address poverty, marginalization, alternate ways of valuing differentiated contribution in society (e.g. the caring economy)
⚙️ Linking to our Shifting Economics for Societal Value coalition through — Developing, assessing, experimenting with alternative models for funding, value exchange and flows and rewarding positive regenerative sustainable impact and multi capitals/capacities
Integrally connected to everything!
Education and Learning and Arts and Culture are fundamental multimodal building blocks that can help shift toward integrated holistic ways of being bring more left and right brain balance to everything. Extending reach, inspiring, developing capabilities and mobilizing social change — these are woven into all coalition themes and the functions that make up our Living Operating System.
We welcome people whose creative work will help to embody and embed learning, art, culture, spirituality, inspiration and innovation — to participate. Cultural creatives, progressive learning modalities and holistic approaches are increasingly moving beyond the fringes and margins. This spirited emergent work is the life blood of movement making…inspiring new stories, joyful resilience, and a (reframed) sense of belonging, with people everywhere and anywhere moving in little and big ways. Bring it on! The regenerative (r)evolution is manifesting in many forms — a dance of emergence and strategy.
Yeah…we know…sounds rather ambitious as described.
Navigating between worlds and and deep SHfT is fraught with difficult challenges, with many of us (still) dependent on conventional economics — affected by the very issues we are trying to overcome. There are many pressures and tensions that reinforce dysfunctional dynamics — holding onto control and domination-oppression patterns. It’s not easy to be in this world and live by and into different rules of engagement and ways of being — to uphold and stay true to healthy collaborative partnership ways.
The good news…it’s underway.
There’s a growing reservoir of youth led and inspired education, publications and resources with young and intergenerational pioneers and practitioners shaping the way. We celebrate, draw from, support, share and build collaboratively from these.
On a planet of 8 billion people, we need to widen the pathways for multitudes of initiatives to flourish for the common good. A spirit of generosity, reciprocity and enabling value flows will lift us all.
A long way to go! We gotta step it up in a variety of interconnected, tangible ways. However, it’s encouraging to see collaborative progress gradually gaining legs. Together — you and we can all be unstitutional.
This article was updated June 2024, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze collaborative communities, initiatives and living lab coalitions where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout this article are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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