Youth-led by design – and onwards

16 out of 54 projects in the WTFutures corpus explicitly define themselves as youth-led. The leadership, design, and direction of the projects are conceived and driven by young people, setting the tone for the rest of the project’s structure and outputs.

Many initiatives emerge directly from youths’ experiences, demonstrating that leadership arises from concern – whether for the Planet or for issues directly affecting them. The Eco-anxiety Africa Project (TEAP) in Nigeria was born from the observation, by young founders of a prior organization, Sustyvibes, that climate change was harming their own mental health. Enter Nusantara “was born out of a coalition of youths who recognized both the urgency of Indonesia’s climate crisis and the need for an inclusive movement.” In these projects, youths take ownership of their experience without waiting for outside support.

Youths participating and co-creating the agenda and methodologies

Projects often center youths as creators rather than passive recipients. Fearless Foundation, for instance, uses participatory art interventions where youths and community members “determine what they want the world to see from them”.

ClimateWorks Lab emphasizes participant-led agenda: “rather than prescribing a fixed curriculum, the team adapted to the group’s interests, letting conversations and project themes emerge from within”. Similarly to this bottom-up strategy that listens to participants, Éco-Motion combines foresight, therapy, and group-supported planning to allow youths to create individualized strategies for sustainable engagement, where “the starting point is always their own perception of a desirable future.”.

Youth-led initiatives are great places for engagement since young people are designing themselves their conditions of work (Enter Nusantara, Bagmati River Youth Project). They can focus on what makes sense for them and not on goals defined by others.

Youth-produced outputs and media

Youth leadership extends to tangible outputs that carry their voice and vision. Enter Nusantara produces outputs such as a podcast (Spill the Tea), Fanzines and art exhibitions, all framed through youths’ perspectives and designed to encourage other young people to participate. These serve as a communication device to engage with them. Net Zero and You(th) alumni initiate local projects including “community fridge campaigns, participatory budgeting proposals, and youth climate panels”. TEAP’s ZenCafe program trains youths to replicate safe-space gatherings across Africa through the Zen Guardians program. These outputs show that youths do not merely participate in predefined activities: they actively create and disseminate content, narratives, and interventions on platforms (online or offline) that are relevant to their peers, making the projects both successful and meaningful to them –  and, who knows best which communication strategy to use in order to reach and implicate youths, than youth !

Peer-to-peer leadership and scaling

Some projects include structured mechanisms for youths to train and support one another. TEAP’s Zen Guardians model allows trained youths to establish their own ZenCafes in other countries. ClimateWorks Lab encourages participants to develop community-oriented projects and personal climate action plans, fostering leadership skills that extend beyond the initial program. The project’s young participants are also encouraged to develop relations and share meals outside of the program so as to foster more profound relationships.These practices embed peer-to-peer mentorship and informal meetings as core components of youth-led work.

Youths leading policy, civic, and social domains

Many projects emphasize that youths are current agents of change, not deferred “future leaders.” Enter Nusantara stresses that youths are “active agents of the present, capable of shaping climate policy and reimagining how sustainability, justice, and finance intersect.” Local Conferences of Youth (LCOY) trains youths to “articulate and present their visions for climate justice” within the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process. Although UNFCCC is not youth-led, LCOY is reserved for youth voices, allowing them to develop recommendations that concern them. Net Zero and You(th) positions participants as translators “between generations, between policy and lived reality, and between fear and action.” TEAP similarly engages youths’ voices in challenging stigma and influencing policymakers regarding the mental health impacts of climate change in Nigeria.

Youth perspectives as central knowledge sources

Youth lived experiences and insights are critical knowledge. Éco-Motion builds upon participants’ eco-emotions and perceptions of desirable futures to guide the organisations’ strategy. Fearless Foundations and LCOYs integrate youth perspectives into public-facing advocacy, reframing institutional and global climate dialogues around their lived realities and imaginative capacities. If we take the time to look into youth-led initiatives, these projects report key insights on how politics can be done differently when integrating youths’ perspective, or by allowing youths to lead the project: in some projects, “participants moved away from debates and moralizing tones, instead using personal stories to open dialogue with those holding different views” (Net-Zero and You(th)). In models where youths have an active organizational role, leadership is often distributed, co-creative, and grounded in the lived realities of the people participating, which on political topics such as climate, can be quite a learning opportunity. 

These projects position youths as today’s agents of change, engaging in civic, policy, and climate action. They embed values such as peer mentorship, collective resilience, and capacity building. By supporting youth leadership, social and ecological transformation scales faster and in real time, as strategies to foster engagement and participation are significantly more adapted, direct and relevant to their age groups. Although these projects show that young people are capable of designing, governing, executing, and communicating ambitious projects, producing ideas, policy directions, knowledge as well as action on the ground, the effect on institutional and corporate decisions has so far been frustrating.

→ How this could change is the focus of one of the WOW! sections: Involving young people in decision making.