Closing Date: Ongoing
Exciting Opportunity: Join the UN Youth Lead Dialogues
Your voice matters
Under the banner of the Youth Lead Festival, young people and partners are coming together in September 2025 to reflect on progress made and recommit to bold action for youth rights, participation, and empowerment.
In the lead-up to this historic moment, youth-led and/or youth-focused conversations are taking place in the form of Youth Lead Dialogues. These dialogues are an opportunity to capture diverse ideas and lived experiences, explore youth priorities and solutions, and feed local voices into global spaces of decision-making. Whether you are gathering in a classroom, coffee shop, community hall, boardroom, or online — your voice matters.
Themes to explore
Each dialogue is unique, and that is by design. However, UN Youth Affairs encourage participants to reflect on one or both of the themes guiding the High-Level Meeting on the 30th Anniversary of the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY):
- Accelerating the implementation of the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY): What is working? What could be better? How can we move faster, together, with a forward-looking lens, ensuring no one is left behind?
- Making youth participation meaningful: How can we ensure that young people can fully, effectively, and meaningfully engage in policymaking and decision-making at national and global levels — for the benefit of both current and future generations?
How to host a #YouthLead Dialogue
- Hosting a dialogue is simple, flexible, and impactful. Anyone! Young leaders, youth organizations, schools, community groups, civil society, UN entities, UN Country Teams, or other partners can host.
- Anywhere — online, in person, or hybrid. It can be part of a class, a meeting, a podcast, a side event — or something entirely new.
- Anyone can participate. Make your space inclusive. UN Youth Affairs encourage intergenerational and diverse participation across ages, identities, experiences and perspectives.
- The UN Youth Office has prepared some tools and resources:
- Guidance – A guidance note outlines important details on everything from the logistics of event planning to the protection and safety of young participants.
- Notetaking – A notetaking template serves as a framework to easily capture the
- outcomes and insights from your #YouthLead Dialogue.
- Submission of results
- You are also welcome to share photos, videos, or creative materials from your event. Tag UN Youth Affairs @unyouthaffairs on social media or use the hashtag #YouthLead for your content to be amplified on UN Youth Office platforms.
Making the Youth Lead Dialogues count
To narrow in on recommendations, select participants who contributed to the conversation will be invited to join a foresight workshop co-led by the UNICEF Innocenti Global Office of Research and Foresight and the UN Futures Lab Global Hub.
This workshop will build on the broader contributions by exploring deeper insights and generating concrete recommendations to advance the youth agenda and strengthen meaningful youth participation. Using the Three Horizons framework, participants will assess the current state of youth affairs, envision preferred futures, and identify innovations, risks and opportunities for action.
The foresight workshop, together with the broader conversations from each self-organized dialogue and additional online engagement platforms, will inform a global summary document with key takeaways and recommendations. The summary document will serve as a key input to the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on 25 September and will connect youth voices to global frameworks like WPAY, the 2030 Agenda, and the Pact for the Future.
Join the global conversation
Your voice belongs to this conversation.
Your story can inspire action.
Your perspective can shape the global agenda.
Take action in one or more of the following ways:
Via #YouthLead Dialogue
- Host a Dialogue — find guidance and tools below
- Participate in an existing Dialogue
- Remember to submit the key takeaways from your Dialogue!
Other Ways to Engage
Unable to host or join a #YouthLead Dialogue? You can still participate:
- Share your ideas and insights on SparkBlue, an online space hosted by UNDP
- Answer the U-Report poll, hosted by UNICEF, by sending the word “LEAD” to U-Report on Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp
No matter how you choose to contribute, all inputs will feed into a global summary document that will inform the high-level meeting commemorating the 30th anniversary of the World Programme of Action for Youth and other intergovernmental spaces.
Click Here To Apply
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