Finalist

Community Engagement Initiative of the Year Award

Youth Talks - We are ready to learn from you!

Finalist of the Community Engagement Initiative of the Year Award

Higher Education for Good Foundation / Youth Talks initiative - Switzerland

"Lead the educational revolution"


Engage on social media

https://www.instagram.com/youthtalks_org/
(Official Youth Talks instagram account)
https://www.facebook.com/Youthtalks.orga
(Official Youth Talks Facebook account)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/youthtalks_org
(Official Youth Talks LinkedIn account)
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@youthtalks8277/videos
(Official Youth Talks Youtube channel)

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Summary

Youth Talks is the first-ever global consultation that asks open-ended questions to 15–29-year-olds about their aspirations, concerns, and expectations for tomorrow.

Harnessing leading edge AI to analyze the youth’s contributions, we don’t impose our ideas or mindset on young people. We offer them a space for sharing, allowing us to naturally bring out consensus and dissensus between the different youth cohorts around the world, and identifying weak signals and latent needs. To encourage a diversity of modes of expression, our online consultation allows young people to participate in writing, record their voices, or upload images on the platform.

As the first initiative of the Higher Education for Good Foundation (HE4G), Youth Talks is designed to deliver deep learnings about what the generation now starting to enter higher education and work expects and needs. To reach out to these young people, HE4G has convened many partners, interested in applying the results of this consultation as they develop their strategies for the years and decades ahead. These partners include leading universities and colleges, international, political, business, and governmental institutions.

HE4G expects the Youth Talks initiative to help catalyze and shape curriculum change. Its role will be to help its partners better understand what young people want and to think through how to integrate this demand with their in-house expertise in education to design curriculums that bring the best of established and innovative knowledge and approaches to education with a clear sense of what young people want.

Key People


Dr. Marine Hadengue
Executive Director
Higher Education for Good Foundation



Dr. Alice Guilhon
Chairperson
Higher Education for Good Foundation



Kristy Anamoutou
Chief Operations & Products Officer
bluenove



Chloé Alves
Partnership Management Officer
Higher Education for Good Foundation


Acknowledgements

The success of the Youth Talks Consultation is owed to the unwavering support and trust of an incredible network of individuals and organizations. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the members of the Higher Education for Good Foundation's board: Jean-Philippe Courtois, Jean-Blaise Eckert, Alain-Dominique Perrin, and Edouard Roquette. We are also grateful to our esteemed scientific committee, led by Frédérique Vidal, and comprised of Rodrigo B. Castilhos, Eric de la Clergerie, Rodolphe Desbordes, and Serena Villata for their invaluable insights and guidance.

We extend our deepest appreciation to our partners, including schools, universities, academic institutions, international and youth organizations, and companies, for their belief in our project and support in promoting our consultation within their communities. We are also immensely grateful for the contributions of our young ambassadors from around the world who joined us in our mission to encourage young people to share their dreams and ideas for the future.

We would like to express our gratitude to Bluenove, our technology consulting company, especially Léa Nghiem, Soazic Leroy-Hure, and Keren Lipiec, for their crucial role in shaping and leading many aspects of the consultation. We also extend our special thanks to the team of 20 Questions to The World, for their creativity and tireless efforts in bringing our consultation to life through their series of videos.

Lastly, we acknowledge with deep appreciation the assistance of Charlotte Le Moing, Anaïs Deal-Hydulphe, Leïla Petit, and Alice Deveaux in creating and shaping our global communication strategy. Their actions embodied the spirit of our consultation, and we are grateful for their contributions to its success.

Images

A strong brand image aligned with the youth esthetics of today

Celebrating diversity through a multitude of visual representation of the youth

Creative project from Blanchard Bosey, one of the Youth Talks ambassador

First mock-up view of the digital platform presenting the results of the consultation

Relaying on a taskforce of ambassadors around the world to promote further our consultation

Repartition of participants worldwide on April 5th

Youth Talks Flyer part 1 -making sens of our project for the youth

Youth Talks Flyer part 2 - making sens of our project for the youth

Youth Talks poster - shared with all our partners to promote our consultation

Youth Talks' Youtube channel with the testimonials of 100 young people

IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

During our consultation, one of the key components was the development of an advocacy program in partnership with various communities. We aimed to recruit young people to help us promote our initiative, understanding the significant impact of peer influence. For some regions, an advocacy program was the sole method to reach out to the youth, emphasizing the importance of involving them in the larger conversation.

We recognized the need to support them in their new role as ambassadors. Many of them were unfamiliar with such projects and responsibilities, which were occasionally beyond their comfort zones. As one of Youth Talks main concerns has always been to empower the youth and give them the tools of self-realisation, we completed our advocacy program with training sessions, toolkits and challenges to help our ambassadors in acquiring new skills that they will be able to implement in their future student and working lives such as speaking publicly, organizing workshops, social media communication or facilitation skills.

Finally, to some extend we hope that our consultation also impacted the lives of all our participants. Through reflective questioning and self-development, our open-ended questions encouraged them to think about their expectations of the world, the place they want to occupy, and their desired roles for the future. We hope that they continue to grow and benefit from this experience, enabling them to participate actively in shaping their future.

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

Patience and endurance would be the main learnings from our project. We realized early on that engaging with young people globally would be challenging, particularly as a brand-new foundation with an unfamiliar project. Even with the help of partners and institutions with established relationships, we underestimated the difficulty of engaging with the youth. We soon discovered that engaging with young people had become an increasing challenging worldwide for every kind of organization, especially since the COVID-19 crisis.

Our journey to keep stakeholders engaged in our consultation was a long one. We worked tirelessly alongside our partners and ambassadors to support them and provide the tools they needed to go the extra mile. It was vital to keep everyone mobilized and active, particularly in the current situation. Therefore, onboarding the right team is crucial.

As we undoubtedly know by now that a project, particularly one of this magnitude, is primarily a human experience. Although its reach is global, everything begins with the team's spirit. The essential aspect is the ability to bring together the individuals involved in the project. Certainly, they must possess the right skills, but their dedication and cohesion are even more critical. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every interaction counts, and each team member has a contribution to offer. Added to this is the reality of daily management and the processes that enable us to be effective and make decisions. Day after day, it is all about striving to strike a balance between these two realities.

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

As our consultation ends, the mission of the Higher Education for Good Foundation is just getting started. Our primary focus will be to amplify the voices of young people worldwide. For seven months, they have entrusted us with their ideas, concerns, and expectations about the future, confident that we will help make their voices heard at the highest international level.

Our first step is to release an online platform, available to all, that gathers all the data and contributions we have received, along with the analysis of our experts, to present the global and local perspectives of the youth. We will organize, in partnership with UNESCO, an exhibition featuring pieces of young artists interpreting our results during the UNESCO General Conference of 2023. Next, we will engage with global organizations and governments to promote these voices and empower young people with our influence. Today, the youth seems to be unheard, and the generational gap has grown immensely in recent years. We must bridge this gap and listen to the youth's changing perspectives.

Furthermore, the Foundation will begin working on its main mission, which is to support higher education institutions in the transformation of their curricula. We aim that institutions will better equip young people to face the challenges of their time by moving beyond acquiring work skills and towards an education that empowers them with the means of self-realization. Our goal is to encourage a systemic worldview in which humankind cohabits in harmony with other living beings within planetary boundaries.

KEY STATISTICS

Over 30,000

Participants to our consultation

Over 500,000

Contributions

206

Countries reached

2,000

Ambassadors

50

Partners worldwide

Triple E Awards

The Triple E Awards are a global recognition of efforts toward the quest for entrepreneurship and engagement in higher education. It is the first award to focus specifically on different dimensions of the universities' third mission. Implemented regionally, the Triple E Awards aim to foster change in universities and to emphasize their role in their communities and ecosystems.

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