Piece by Peace: A Collaborative UNESCO Youth Movement to a Brighter Future

Our collective work began not with a mandate, but with a series of online coffees and informal exchanges. We learned about how each of our countries organises youth engagement, and these conversations allowed us to learn from each other. We have found that when you meet someone as a friend, you will no longer regard them as a stranger. The personal contact that we initiated transformed strangers into colleagues, and colleagues into friends. Through these connections, we found friends across the world with entirely different backgrounds, languages and personal networks. 

A basis of friendship and trust allows for openness and safety in discussions of differing values, and even of different interpretations of what friendship means. Laying out the foundations for safe spaces of dialogue allows collaborations to emerge and thrive. When you work from a basis of peaceful connection, harmful and disruptive conflict will move further and further away from our reality. Feelings of shared responsibility and of security in regard to our shared futures, combined with our movement to create a safe space for everyone, form an effective approach to sustainable peace

Youth engagement is often treated as a symbolic gesture, and it should not be. Youth engagement can form a bridge for knowledge transfer between UNESCO and grassroots communities, and between generations. In policy-making processes, the interests of all affected populations should be taken into account. We believe that including young voices early on will help generations before us to share their knowledge and lifelong experience with current and younger generations at an early stage. This can help safeguard traditions, beliefs, best practices, and skills that already contribute to our shared cause. It will allow for critical and collaborative reflection from a multitude of lived realities, so that we can continue to work in meaningful ways.

In conclusion, we imagine a future in which a youth participation format is established in every UNESCO Member State in the world. Youth participation formats, as applicable in their respective contexts, would be welcomed with open arms by their National Commission to give advice both when asked for it and when they consider it necessary. Friendships would be built between National Commissions, focused on young people taking inspiration and providing peer support for one another in the common causes that form the mandate of UNESCO. Finally, UNESCO would benefit from a platform that can easily connect youth participation formats to enable them to collaborate on local, regional, and international levels. This platform and the synergies following from it would enhance the inclusivity and impact of UNESCO’s work, and further help to track UNESCO’s impact on young people around the world.

In a world where our differences are often emphasised, learning on the basis of friendship can help shift this emphasis to what we share as human-beings, while retaining the beauty of difference. In the convergence of friendship and willingness to learn, we will find ourselves in a world where young people carry a slightly lighter burden of insecurity with them. Let us continue building peace in the minds and hearts of people, piece by piece.