 My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at US Institute of Peace. And for those who don't know who we are, US Institute of Peace was founded about 35 years ago by the US Congress with the very explicit mission of connecting research with policy ideas, with education training, and direct support for partners working on the front lines of violent conflict for the service of preventing and resolving violent conflict. We have this awesome mission, and we work around the world with partners. And I think all of us in this room are keenly aware that you're not going to arrive at peace if you aren't wholly inclusive, including of youth. So we're delighted to have a chance to host this event today in partnership with the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace, and Security. And for those who are watching online, you can join the conversation on Twitter at Youth4Peace. And of course, that's a four, numeral four, Youth4Peace, because it's hip and young, right? But yeah, it's hashtag Youth4Peace. There we go. Thank you, Sachi. I want to particularly thank our wonderful partners from Search for Common Ground, from Interpeace, and from UNDP, who have really been leaders in pushing forward this important agenda. And we have an opportunity today to review the findings from an independent progress study called the Missing Peace, which was mandated by the UN Security Council Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace, and Security. So this is an opportunity to say, hey, how are we doing on this really critical agenda? And what it really does is it helps us polish up that lens for how does the peace building field enable and engage youth voices to be a part of this important endeavor. We have really redoubled our efforts here at USIP over the last several years. We have a wonderful team led by Aubrey, Allison, Milovsky's back in the back, and other members of our youth team. And I want to really commend them for pushing this forward. We really believe that youth peace and security is critical to increase the kind of inclusion without which we cannot have sustained peace. This was really brought home to me. I was in Iraq last week. And I met with a number of particularly women leaders who have been on the front lines of the women peace and security movement for the last decade plus in Iraq. And it was interesting, one of them said to me towards the end, she goes, you know, it is going to be up to the next generation to carry this agenda forward. And it's really up to the youth. And I think we are constantly struck by the fact that these changes around issues of peace and security, they are generational to affect change. And so you need to constantly have a fresh, re-energized youth voice to help make this happen. And it's also where we get a lot of our hope. I know for me the Generation Change Network that Aubrey, Allison, and the team run of global youth leaders who are active and actively building peace in their own communities is one of the things that gives me enormous hope, including the fact that or the part of the program where every year we take a group of them to Dharamsala for a two-day conversation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Sajji joined us three years ago for this. And these are all young people who, despite being in circumstances that would defeat many of us, they have chosen a path towards peace instead of towards anger and resentment. And I am deeply inspired by them. Giannini is here with us, one of our youth leaders from Generation Change, who was with us this last year. And so you may have more reflections on that. But this is vital to enable those voices. So with that, I'm delighted to welcome all of you. And I'm happy now to introduce Noelle Richard, who is the youth team leader at UNDP New York. And she coordinates UNDP's work on youth and co-chair of the Global Coalition for Youth, Peace, and Security. So please join me in welcoming Noelle. Hi. Good morning to all. It's really nice to see a mix of familiar faces and a lot of new faces as well. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, Aubrey, for really making this happen. I'm very indeed very proud to be part of this Global Coalition on Youth, Peace, and Security. And really happy to moderate this panel today. Just came back from the EcoSoc Youth Forum, which is the largest and institutionalized space for youth in the UN, with more than 1,000 young people, with a total shift, I would say, in discourse that we can witness at the moment in the way in which we talk about the positive contribution that young people can play in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, but also on youth, peace, and security, on climate action. It's really absolutely re-energizing to hear and see all these young leaders sharing their experiences from the field. So today we'll definitely build on the great work that Graham has done with the missing piece, with the progress study mandated by the Security Council on Youth, Peace, and Security. We will hear about the work that Aubrey is leading on youth in UCEP, and we will have Gigi from Venezuela giving us sort of a reality check also from the field. I will quickly introduce all of you as Nancy mentioned, Gigi, you worked closely with UCEP on a number of programs. You're also a passionate human rights advocate and communication specialist. You've developed a lot of powerful social media campaigns. You yourself say that being originally from Venezuela has taught you to drive innovation in order to accomplish a vision. You also became the first Venezuelan in a prestigious Atlas Core Fellowship in DC, and you're also a Google Policy Fellow and part of a large Latin American think tank, Cedice Libertad. So after that I will introduce another young woman on this panel, Aubrey, so from UCEP. You are a close ally and partner in the context of the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace, and Security. It's been a pleasure to work with you over the past years. You manage the institute's youth portfolio, as Nancy mentioned. Specifically this generation change fellows program, and you're also a trainer in the UCEP's academy, and you work to train young leaders, UN staff, African Union staff, also peacekeepers, and civil society partners around the world. And last but certainly not least are superstar lead author Graham Simpson, who was appointed by DSG to lead on this amazing task, and who developed what is certainly the most interesting bold, and I would say probably the most participatory and inclusive process and piece that was ever written for the Security Council, in my opinion. You're also the director of Interpeace USA and the senior advisor to the director general of Interpeace. Interpeace is a global, I'm sure you all familiar with them, but it's a global peace building organization working in 20 conflict and immediate post-conflict zones in the world. And you're also an adjunct lecturer in law at Columbia University. So Graham, we will start with you, because we would like to hear a bit more about the missing piece, about the findings, and the key recommendations of the study. Great, thank you. And I really want to thank the United States Institute of Peace for creating this space and for bedding this down in the DC community and helping us do that. And it's a natural fit, I think, through Aubrey's work and through the team at USIP. I think there's been, you've been stalwarts in kind of driving this agenda and providing the support. So it's kind of payback time. It's time to report back. I'm in the luxurious position that whilst over the last couple of years, all of you have been getting older. I have been getting younger, because I have spent the last two years in the luxurious position of engaging in a process of listening to young people and bread of a recognition implicit in Security Council Resolution 2250, which was the first resolution in the Council specifically dedicated to young people. But implicit in the resolution is a recognition of the fact that 1.8 billion young people globally, at least a quarter and potentially a third of whom are living in situations of ongoing conflict or in which they're exposed to sustained violence, that that youth community globally has no voice, has no presence, has no place, and that this is a desperate gap in the multilateral system. So implicit in the establishment of the resolution, which was driven through the organizational power of young people, networks of young people who got this on the table, who won this in a way. And we can't afford to be too naive about it. I think when the resolution was passed in the Security Council, there were very different motivations. It was at a time when I think very few people would have been surprised if it was impossible to get unanimity in the Council on anything. And in some ways, it was because some of the members of the Council were eager on this agenda because they recognized the need for young people's inclusion, for participation, for the potential of young people globally. There were others in the mix who saw this as being a way of dealing with terrorism, that saw young people as a threat, young people as a problem to be solved. And so in a way, you had a coalescing of very different motivations behind the Security Council resolution. But at the same time, what the resolution did is it provided for and called for what was called a progress study on youth peace and security, which remarkably focused on and demanded that we focus on the positive contribution that young people are making to youth peace and security. And that's the study that I was luxuriously appointed, along with 21 advisors who were appointed by the Secretary General. My initial response was too many cooks in the kitchen. That's impossible. But uniquely, half of those were young people. This was an extraordinary group, a mixture of scholars, of practitioners, and of policy thinkers. And that working in that triangle of policy, practice, and scholarship was also a unique characteristic of the study. And I was appointed as an independent author, which was a luxurious position, because what it meant was that we could really, A, listen to young people, and B, really provocative in what we said, and know that we had room to actually, we had to navigate the politics, as we always do, but to be assertive about a particular agenda. So that by way of background on the mandate of the study. At its heart was, and this became very clear very quickly, was a deep and growing chasm of trust, a mistrust of young people who were increasingly losing confidence in their governments, in the multilateral system, often in international NGOs, and indeed in some senses, in the delivery of representative democracy itself. That young people were actually raising really important challenges about this. So at the heart of the study was this sense of mistrust. But young people also very quick to point out that they themselves felt mistrusted. They pointed to the stereotypes with which young people were viewed. Very gendered, that as soon as the conversation about peace and security was on the table and young people, the immediate imagery was of a young man with a gun, and a young woman consigned to the passive status of victimhood. And they said all of these stereotypes deprive us of our agency, of our role, of our innovation, of our creativity as progenitors of peace, rather than young people as a problem, young people as a threat, young people as a risk of violence. And these stereotypes also bred and have infused a series, and we identify this in the study, a series of policy assumptions and policy myths. What we actually talk about is policy panic that reinforces these views of young people, and consequently invests, I think, skews investment in the way we think about this. And the three policy myths that we talk about are firstly, the assumption that bulging youth populations, a larger proportion of young people as a proportion of the population in societies presents a necessary risk of increased levels of violence. The second is the assumption that migration and youth migration in particular, not just between countries, but urbanization, comes with the associated threat of infiltration, of growing terrorism, of crime and that young people are this threat through the migration lens. And the third and perhaps the most striking is that all young people are in some ways at risk of being recruited into extremist armed groups. And not only does the study show that there is scant evidence to sustain these things and that, to quote the Stimson report recently, that we have, as a result of this, completely securitized the way in which we think about young people. Despite the fact that there's huge evidence to contradict these assumptions, we spent 2.8 trillion in the US alone between 2002 and 2017 on counter-terrorism and on violent extremism, 175 billion in 2017 alone, the massive investment, and yet the vast majority of young people are not involved in violence. We can't afford to romanticize them any more than we can demonize them. They're not all hippies and building peace, but there is an extraordinary creative, innovative sector of young people who are and the vast majority of young people are not engaged in violence. It's a tiny sliver and we're investing masses of resources in this highly securitized approach to young people. So, what was the first thing we had to acknowledge in the study? The first thing was, we couldn't reproduce the problem we were trying to solve. If we didn't make the study an inclusive and participatory process, we were going to reproduce the experience of exclusion and marginalization. So, in some ways, this involved a creative team willing to do this, dragging the UN a little bit into an unfamiliar territory of saying, you know what, regional consultations with the usual young people, have the language skills, have the passports, can usually engage with or have been the selected ones, either by the UN or by their governments, the hand-picked young people, that that's not young people who we called erroneously hard to reach. Those are not the young people who don't normally have a voice in these processes. So, we have to go beyond that. Of course, as soon as we did, young people were very quick to say to us, please stop talking about us, it's hard to reach. We're not hard to reach. You're just not very good at listening to us, yeah? But it was through, and this is another thing that I think is really important, we shouldn't underestimate, it was through the crafting of a coalition of civil society organizations that had strong, trust-based access to young people on the ground because they'd been working with them, that we could create not just access to young people who would not normally have had a voice, but a completely different quality of data because it's the youth voice that is in the study. The participatory inclusive process, over 280 focus groups in 44 countries, 36 thematic and country-specific studies, a global survey of youth-led peace-building organizations, a completely different exercise in accessing young people's voice, and therefore an uncontestable evidence-based, database system, and even then we have to acknowledge we barely scratched the surface. So, there is something very important in the methodology of the study. At its heart, young people described their exclusion. And if we, if there is one core message in the progress study, it is at its center that until we address what young people described as the violence of their exclusion, until we counter the violence of exclusion, we will never prevent the violence of extremism. And so connecting those two things was really critical. And young people described their exclusion in very detailed ways. Exclusion was political, it's economic, it's educational, it's gender-based. It is exclusion because they lack protections from a human rights framework and environment. They are exposed and in violation. And I should say, we have to move beyond just the formality of these things. Young people populated this conversation with rich, deep understandings. So yes, they were talking about young people's participation in electoral systems and in parliaments. And yes, they were arguing young people are not too young to run. And we need to think about young people as elected officials, not just as participants in elections. But they were also saying to us, if you want to understand where young people meet their states, where is the state-society relationship exercised? It's in the criminal justice system. It's in education. These are systems that are largely about us, but in which we have no voice in the policy space which is about criminal justice reform or the content and design of educational systems. So political participation was nothing without us. It was in all of these spaces that affected young people's lives. In relation to the economy, young people were saying to us, yes, jobs are very important for us, but they're not important to us because we're economic automatons. We want to stake in the economy. They're important to us because we can see horizontal inequality through globalization differently. And we need to move beyond just jobs and we need to recognize that it's about economic participation. It's about meaning. It's about belonging. It's about a stake in society. The gender discourse was absolutely fundamental as young people said, exclusion is differentiated along the lines of gender. And we need to look at the particular experiences of young women in all of these contexts. And yes, we need to engage with the positive aspirations of creating alternative, nonviolent forms of masculinity that are not about control and access to young women. So the gendered conversational. So in all these ways, young people described a comprehensive, thorough experience of exclusion. And there is a core set of recommendations of the study. I won't go into the recommendations that are about saying, how do we address that? How do we create what young people describe as meaningful inclusion, meaningful participation? So that's the first message. The second message was that there is an alternative path for investing in the upside, for thinking about that major investing differently in the much larger proportion of young people who are not on the wrong side of this divide, who are not involved in violence. And what the study does is it tries to describe a kind of typology of youth-led and youth-based peace building. What we talk about is the innovation, the creativity, the resourcefulness and the resilience of young people's contribution to peace. And it's extraordinary and enriching to look at young people who are saying, we weren't waiting for the policy community to invent a policy around sustaining peace, which is engaged across all the phases of conflict. Young people are building peace across all phases of the peace and conflict cycle from early intervention models that are about prevention with younger children right through to post-conflict peace processes which young people are saying, we need to be at the table, around the table and support those at the table in peace processes and negotiations. Young people working from the most local level in people-to-people peace building in their schools, in their communities, at a local level, right through to global coalitions driving the policy agenda on youth peace and security at the UN and international. Young people were breaking with tradition and understanding the importance of working across different topologies of conflict, recognizing the relationship between gender-based violence, political violence, terrorism, criminality, et cetera, et cetera. I remember talking to young people and listening to young people in the Caribbean who said, if you talk only about violent extremism, you will completely exclude not just the lived experience that is about gangs and gender-based violence in our areas in the Caribbean and Central America. You will also lose access to 25 years of deep thinking about youth-based violence prevention and programming and harm reduction work, et cetera, et cetera. Young people were illustrating completely new and innovative ways of working on peace building through sports and culture, et cetera, et cetera. Very concerned. Don't marginalize us. Don't get to us. Don't talk about us just through ministries of sport and culture. Actually, young people are everywhere. Don't just think you can find us in youth organizations. Youth leadership are in women's organizations, in trade unions. We are in the police, and we are in the community being policed. And so this was very powerful in the way in which young people described, but the innovation and creativity in the way which they've claimed the space and claimed an occupied cyberspace found mechanisms for direct connectivity and direct political participation, shaken the limitations of representative democracy. These are amazing things that we have to learn from. And so I won't go into more detail of it, but the second, essentially, the second set of recommendations is we have an alternative investment path. It's the investment not in young people as a risk and as a problem, but in this innovative, creative, resourceful and the investment in youth-led and youth-based peace building, the resilience of young people. And so in conclusion, what this, if the study is saying this is about new ways of thinking about inclusion and a set of recommendations about that, new ways of investing in young people and the creative partnerships that they forge and the new ways of investing in that, that's a set of recommendations around investing in youth-led peace building and the capacities and the resources and the partnerships they drive. Then we also need to recognize that this demands seismic shifts in the way in which the multilateral system and governments think about this and the way in which we ensure that young people lead in these processes. Firstly, the seismic shift is in demanding that we move from an approach to this which is driven by risk to one which is shaped by thinking about resilience. And the second is how we move from an approach to this which is investing in remedial security-based approaches or hard security-based approaches to one which is focused on prevention and early intervention models. And so I'm gonna leave it there and hopefully I've described the study enough and I'll probably use more than my time allocation. No, it's fine. Thank you very much. And during the discussion, because we really have allocated enough time, I think, for this session to be very interactive. So we will have an opportunity to go a bit deeper into these recommendations. Certainly, the political role that young people can play, I think, was a really important finding of this report, of this study. Really trying to see young people in their positive contribution in civil society but also in the context of decision-making and political participation, formal or not. And that was, I think, really interesting to move away from limiting the conversation to youth employment and how that can prevent violence. I mean, this is a major paradigm shift. Aubrey, in the context of USEP, as I said, you were a very strong ally in that process. Could you tell us a little bit about how you fed, in particular through your research work into the progress study development? Yes, thank you. And thank you, Graham, for giving us a solid overview of the study. So USEP has a long history of engaging youth in peace and security work, in peace-building work. And we've done it, we've engaged youth in a number of ways throughout two decades, probably. But in the recent years, with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2250 and with the publishing of this progress study, we've made a few strategic additions to our portfolio. And I wanna talk about those additions because they're really in response to this growing and evolving field. So the first edition we made was in response to one of the key findings that Graham didn't really dive into in his overview, which is the really obvious gap for funding in the youth peace and security space and the importance of the international community finding ways to address that. So funding kind of at the higher levels, but also funding youth-led organizations. So this year USIP launched a youth in peace-building grants competition that will allow USIP to fund youth-led organizations working for peace in the field, which is a goal that many institutions and organizations share, but these institutions and organizations come with inherent blockages or policies or restrictions that make funding small, informal, or formal youth-led organizations really difficult. And so we're really excited that we finally have a mechanism through which we can fund at this point formalized or registered youth-led organizations, but also in the future more informal civil society organizations that maybe aren't registered, but are youth-led. So we're working to create more space and more access for young people who are actively building peace in their communities. The second is in response to a call for more work to be done on the youth peace and security agenda. The study highlights that there is a lack of evidence and there's a lack of research in this field. And so one way that we worked to address the gap in research and the gap in evidence is through our participatory action research program where we funded youth-led research, where they came up with the research questions that addressed peace and conflict in their communities without any kind of nudging or influence of the US government or USIP. So it was genuinely youth-led in response to the way they understand conflict in their communities. We also have launched a meta review of youth peace-building programs at USIP. So this meta review is going to look at the last 10 years of youth programming at USIP through implemented projects or programs, but also through our grants mechanism. And so with this meta review, we're really trying to understand what's been working, what hasn't been working, so that we can improve as an institute, but we can also publish these findings and inform the youth peace and security agenda for other peace-building organizations or governments that are working in this space. And the third kind of strategic addition we've made to our youth portfolio is to launch our Youth Advisory Council for the Institute. And this is the first time the Institute has had a body of youth that will serve as a resource and as partners in our peace-building work. They'll provide not even feedback, but ideally a genuine partnership in the development of our programs, whether they're youth-focused or not, because as Graham mentioned, youth are not just in youth programs. Youth are in security sector, they're in governance, they're in countering violent extremism. So we have now a body for the Institute to tap and get a pulse on how the youth are experiencing conflict in their communities and how they understand the needs. They'll also implement research projects together. And so increasing the amount of youth-led research that is being published by USIP. And then one, the first task or the first kind of objective that they are working on is creating an internal that can also be shared publicly, youth inclusion framework for our programs as a whole. And so USIP in recent years published a gender framework that is meant to be used across the Institute to make sure that at all levels, through whether it's policy or programming, we're applying a gender lens and we're thinking through how are we building programs that are genuinely inclusive. And so one of the first tasks for the Youth Advisory Council is to work with our USIP team and build upon our gender framework to create a youth framework that can be applied in a similar way. Great. Thank you very much, Aubrey. Thank you for giving very illustrative examples on about how you include youth in programming and including through youth-led initiatives and youth-led research, but also how you think about your own organizational readiness or the inclusion within USIP with this new advisory council and the reflection on funding which I think is something we should all urgently have. We cannot continue to also replicate this exclusion problem that we're trying to solve through the funding and we need to be able to reach out to youth-led organizations, formal or not as per our current definition and be able to really feed into this innovation in the field. So the more we explore innovative mechanisms, I think the better and thank you for sharing that. Now we'll move to our young peacebuilder here, Gigi, from Venezuela, as I said, could you tell us a little bit about, you know, about perhaps your reaction to these recommendations from the progress study, whether that resonates with the work that you're doing and anything else you may want to share about your experience also as part of this program. Thank you and thank you so much, everyone, for inviting me to be here. First of all, I just want to say that this study is very, very important as a matter of like, it shows evidence of like the work that we're doing actually can be effective. It resonates with this study, like the fact that it shows like, youth can be very organized. Like if you see like youth organizations in Venezuela with the lack of resources that we have and the whole crisis that you can imagine that is happening, youth organizations are managed to use every single tool they have to make an impact. We're talking about if we don't have like electricity, we build our own like electricity plants. If we don't have internet, we're trying to use like HTML version of Gmail. If we cannot have access to money or like credit cards, you use somehow PayPal or gift cards of like Google Playcard to pay for or like the resources of organizations. So somehow we managed to use all this trauma and all this conflict to actually work with it, which is a very important thing. In Venezuela, for example, one of the organizations that I support work with less than $1,000 budget per month and do an incredible job like moving humanitarian aid to the border of Colombia or like teaching people about like this simplicity of like economics. So another thing that I really like about the study is like it shows how youth is ready to move from ideas to action. We actually are very tired, I think I can say, of like loan papers of 150 pages like why like Latin American youth, delegation youth need help. We actually need like ideas right now like to move to action. And one of the things that we're doing on the ground is using technology. Technology and social media is one of the factors that are helping us to overcome all this barrier and actually be impactful of our work. If I give you an example of this is how in the media there's like a problem or like a situation that is happening in Venezuela in this case that might not be like mainstream but using the right tools on social media and using like the use of influencers we can actually put that in the agenda that guys there is like a humanitarian crisis happening in this town called Maracaibo when they have been five days without electricity. And somehow that resonates with people using like different type of media. And it's very interesting what Graham says about like gender which is a very important thing that we all need to understand. At the moment you were born in Venezuela and you are a girl, you have no political voice. You are a girl so you have to go home with your husband or you have to go home with your kids. So the society is not expecting you to speak or being an activist but that's changing. And we need support for multilateral organizations and for organizations like USIP that empower women to have a voice. Like things that women in Venezuela are doing mostly of them like alone with their kids so mostly of them trying to overcome this by being strong I think it works like highlighting in not only like policies but also like the aid of like the resources that are being allocated with it. And one sign of a show of this is like the program that USIP has like generation shame program. When I first arrived to India last year the first thing I noticed is like the three trainers are women and they are women that are incredibly strong in their fields from South Sudan, from Nigeria and from Colombia. So they can speak, I can see myself on them because they have overcome so much conflict and trauma by being active and being effective. So that was incredibly inspiring to have three trainers that were another fellows from another programs and they can show me how far you can get in this field. Before that you can see like US Security Council or like these big guys, like they are men and you might think oh this is impossible to get but then meeting all these people like Nancy, like Aubrey, like they are doing such a great job as a women in this field that is very inspiring. And then like the fact that we had the opportunity to sit with the, he's holding to like Lama and he also brought into the table the importance of like women empowerment and women right, women education, it was like very, very powerful. Clap, yes. Excellent, fantastic. I think it speaks to the work that still is ahead of us I think to secure inclusive and safe spaces for young men but also for young women, for young people in all their diversity to really not just have a voice or be given a voice but to be heard and to be able to make a real change happen through political participation, through the media, online or offline, I mean in a broad range of sectors. So really inspiring to hear that and to hear also the fact that you're never limited, like the resiliency is total. I mean we could hear such an innovation, an innovative way but also resilient way by young people to really approach so many of the problems that perhaps other groups would have more difficulty addressing, it was really inspiring. So we'll open the floor actually now for Q and A's. If you have any reflections, if yourself are involved with peace building initiatives, if you're a young peace builder, young researcher, we want to hear from you and your views on this topic and I see a few mics, yes, Romain, yes. Thank you for you guys being here, I appreciate that. Let me give you a little background before I ask this question. I spent, my name's Richard Robinson, I work for INL Cap. Before I started working for them, I spent the last 27 years in juvenile justice in the states. So my question when it comes to youth coalition and peace building and I'm only basing this on national experience, when you bring a group of youth together, how do you ensure that they are truly a cross-section of all youth? Are they ethnically diverse? Do they represent all levels of social and economic background, transgender, different types of gender-based backgrounds and so on? Because typically in my experience when bringing a youth coalition together, you're talking about youth who've been exposed to either educationally or through their parents a larger picture of you. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Versus some who may not. So in order to really get the true discussion going with across that section, how do you do that? What are some of the steps you take? Do you go into different areas? Do you ensure that you get a true cross-section of the youth? Thank you very much. We'll take two or three questions before reverting back to the panel. First of all, thank you so very much for all your perspectives and your great work and just hearing about the amazing experience that the young people are doing on the ground. My name is Rabin Pasha and I see a lot of good friends that I've worked with over the years. I'm founder of an incubator working with young entrepreneurs in Iraq in the Kurdistan region of Iraq where I was originally from. And I went back to do that after a decade of international development and other partner shows because there was a lot of the... I saw that societal fabrics were falling apart because there was so much exclusion of young people from the opportunities. And I think what I hear from you and when we had from our experience in the past three, four years is that you have to, and as you have mentioned, the exclusion is so broad. And when we think about young people, like can we stop just thinking about... I mean, this is like a majority of the population, literally. They're like us. We were young once, right? Aren't we? Some of us still are. You have to think about, they are exactly the same cross-sections of everything we have. And in places like Iraq, but even as different in Middle East and others, like even in Saudi Arabia, half of the population, 50%, is under 20. This is a majority of the population. So if you include millennials who are now the older young people, really, right? I mean, we're talking... This is literally the vast, vast majority. And when it comes to engaging these voices, and I've heard that in a lot of them, and thank you for what the report went into it, you have to think about some of those who've had the privilege and the access to be the voices, and how do we really, really reach the people who have not had the privilege and the access in the status quo? And it's our institutions are a part of that sometimes. Like the bureaucracies of the global institutions are a part of that, because we work with partner countries, partner countries, there are some voices that are in the status quo, and then these voices are part of the power. And when you give opportunity to everyone, that threatens the status quo. And so how do we really, really try to get to them? And then the other side of that question and some suggestion about that is like when you listen to the stories and the voices, the young people on the ground who are put in these situations that are limited are taking advantage of everything, and especially technology, because that's a place that some of us and most of the, let's say people in power and the older generation don't really understand technology by virtue of not understanding, they've not been able to get into it and exclude people as much as they've been in other forms of power. And so how do we tap into empowering, investing in that, in our institutions, and bring people together maybe virtually as well, bring some of the private sector people? And really, I mean, I implore and I will stop talking, but it's really have to invest into some of the virtual ways of connecting and getting to people and figuring out exactly what is they're using, lifting that up to a next level. Stop going back there and tell them our experience as such and such and development as let's work across these spreadsheets, right? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have a third one, yes, then? Thank you. Yeah, it was very good to hear, I think it was Gigi talking about youth organization and yeah, because I work with an NGO supporting sort of youth action and impact, and we see a lot of young people who have amazing amounts of energy, but perhaps quite often aren't sure exactly the best way to channel that energy. And I think recently we've seen the youth climate strikes and huge amounts of young people just going out onto the streets because they're not sure what else to do. So yeah, quite a broad question, but I'd love to hear from the panel if you have any more specific pieces of advice on the best strategies or approaches or channels youth can take to really sort of get organized and have those sort of voices heard in a meaningful way. Thank you. Great, thank you very much. So we'll go back to the panel. Gigi, do you want to start? Yeah. Thank you for your questions. I will try to do like an overview of all of them really fast. For the first one that you were asking about how we can ensure that the group of youth that we are like interviewing or like having in a place is like the right one. It's really important in my case to identify the leaders of each community. I wish we can have like a forum of like 3,000 million views and everyone can't speak, but unfortunately that's not the case. This like study like interview like 4,000 people and it's actually like imagine like only like 10% of the actual population of youth, but in this case if you really want to have like a crowd that identifies the problem of each community, it should be one leader from the indigenous community, one leader for the women rights community, one leader for like the disability community in the way that everyone can be involved and then your message or like the thing that the product you try to build or anything that you try to build sexually has a voice in every community. And it's a ways to engage like with the organization of youth. It's very important that you don't distinct about an organization, a youth organization. It works like the same. It has to be an objected. It has to be a strategic plan. It has to be a communications plan. And most of people when they refer to like youth organization, they think that it's a basement with a bunch of like beers and like TVs and video games. And it's not. It's just like a normal organization that it works with objective, with like an impact and with a mission the same, but it's led by youth people with like a different approach. So my advice will be in the strategy, just run it like a normal organization. It has to have a purpose on it. And the purpose has to have like deadlines and reach and team and fundraising and social media strategy. Like what you're saying about technology, we need to start moving movements online too. Because most of the people, yes they are in social media, but are not doing anything good with it. So we need to take advantage of like this, especially in this country where right now it can be with you and somebody is like watching at home like in Venezuela, we need to take advantage of that. I think we are like doing it. 80% of the media is controlled by the government, but somehow like two million people since in the street because they know by Twitter where they have to be, where it's like the built-in movement, where they can put the food for like the human interne in the border, you know? So I think it's just trying to shift for like the things that we used to do and not like completely like destroy it, just like make it better. Representative Drive-Gramm. Okay, so I mean just on this question of representivity to the extent to which we ensure that the youth community or constituencies adequately represented in every context. I mean, so to start with thinking about this at a global level, I mean one of the things that was really important for the study was we were determined it wasn't as easily to fund the focus group work in the global north. But it was very clear to us that there was a grave danger that this agenda could be seen as the exclusive preserve of young people in conflict-defected societies in the global south and we were very determined that that wasn't the case. So we made sure that we were running focus groups with second-generation migrants in the neighborhoods of Stockholm and with African-American youth in Chicago and New York and there is a lesson in that because when we heard young people in the south side of Chicago talk about guns, they sounded remarkably like young people in South Sudan talking about guns and the universality of the way in which this connects young people across these divides are very important. So there's a representational issue which is a global one. Like I say, I think we scratched the surface and we were under resourced and we talked about 1.8 billion young people globally. This is, it's a limitless challenge but to have indigenous young women in the foothills of Guatemala, young gang members in Honduras or second-generation migrants in Stockholm or young men in south side Chicago, young women ex-combatants or combatants from the Philippines, this is the diversity of the kind of focus group process. I think there are gaps in that. I think that when we think about participation inclusion we also need to recognize the study didn't get to some of the real data gaps. I think there's a devastating lack of randomized sampling and perception surveys done with young people and I think that we need to think about that extending participation. It's about randomized sampling is about getting to young people with different voices in different ways and quantifying the data and making it measurable. This is really important in doing this. So it's not just about, we have to be really careful of a narrow approach to representation. The second thing I'll say is that there wasn't a single consultation or focus group meeting where the young people in the room didn't raise this very question. Where they weren't saying, who do we represent? We are a microcosm of the wider society. We have to be really careful in the Western European consultation that we haven't, that this group represents the real youth profile of Europe and that's changing. That there are voiceless young people who are institutionalized that we can't access. We have to find ways of doing this, that we are crossing and recognizing as a woman, peace and security movement has that the identity of youth or the identity of gender is cross cut by issues of race and class and ethnicity and gender and clan and that these are really important things that we shouldn't treat this as a, we shouldn't allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good but we need to recognize these things and young people, this awareness of this, the predominant voice for me in this was young people saying in relation to a global policy approach, we can't speak up until we can listen down. We can't speak out until we listen in and how we do that is about diversifying the way in which we access young people. So on this representational issue, I think this is really important. I just do want to touch on one, and by the way, there are dangers because we also think about the occupation of cyberspace, alternative ways of accessing young voice. We need to be really careful, we don't lose sight of the way in which the digital divide is gendered and dictates who doesn't, doesn't get heard. So these are really important questions which I think the study wrestles with and articulates. I don't think we can pretend to solve it. I do want to just talk about one other aspect which is this question of what youth organization looks like, where the innovation, creativity comes from. I mean, the survey undertaken by Search for Common Ground, the United Network of Young Peace Builders of youth-led peace-building organizations was dramatic in the way in which it identified that the vast majority of youth-led organizations are small, local, tiny budgets, volunteer-driven, it's a tiny proportion that are looking at the major budgets and large infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. And that should alert us to both an importance and a danger. Young people are saying, we have to be able to invest, we need more resources to invest in this, scale up our work, measure our work more effectively, professionalize our field, fund our partnerships. These are all really important things and they all come with their own dangers that we don't, in some ways, throw money at these things and kill the intimate trust-based local nature of many of these organizations. That we don't invest in partnerships which sometimes may mean young people lose their power in those relationships rather than lead. That we don't professionalize a field and kill the voluntrism, that is at the heart of young people and that we don't start saying measurement should be log frame, everything you do and we devastate the innovation and risk-taking, the dissent, the disruptiveness of creative youth-led peace-building. So it's not about don't invest, it's about recognize the creativity and the entrepreneurialism, find ways of sustaining and supporting that and be aware that you can do harm in the way you invest, so the smart investment in young people's capacity. This changes the way we think about it, I think in a big way. Great, Aubrey on the representational issue or perhaps on this important funding question? Well, I won't speak much because I think the other panelists really did a good job of summarizing. On the issue of representation, I would say it's different for each organization but underlying it is expensive and time-intensive and really important and you have to do it. And so you put all your resources into developing really as inclusive as you can programs and through our meta review, we're actually getting great feedback, bad feedback that's really good for us. So we're learning the gaps in our programs. Like what we learned that the LGBTQI community is largely unrepresented in USIP programs. So that's a sort of, like it's an important lesson for us to think about and learn and try to constantly improve. Great, are there more questions in the room? Yes, can we have a voice of a young woman? Yes. Hello, I'm Christina and I'm from the Stimson Center. I wanted to thank you very much for leading on this independent study. It's very much representative of we young people and I can say that I had a little bit of input into it because at the time when it was led by you, I was an intern at the office for the rule of law and security institutions at the DPKL and I was in charge of getting input from all the units to your study and that was fascinating for me. I want, I have a question for Noelia actually speaking of the UN and given the fact that the study was led by the UN largely, I wanted to know what exactly, how is the UN trying nowadays, given the current study also, trying to involve young people into UN processes? And I know Ecosoc is a great forum, but let me tell you that I've been having interactions with the Romanian delegates to the UN, which are part of the Ecosoc forum. They usually come there every single year and not only them, even this past year with other youth delegates and they're quite frustrated of the fact that they don't really know if their participation actually matters when they are at the UN and they don't know exactly what they can take. So one, they don't know how they're actually contributing to the UN and they don't know what they're actually taking back home and try to reproduce locally or at the national level. So I wanted to know a little bit more about how the UN is trying to involve at least for the next years. Yes, another question here. I am from George Meston University and what I see as one of the problems in Nigeria, among the youths, it's not all about their voices being heard, it's all about healing the pens. Many of them have lost a lot, their parents, their siblings and some of them have been wounded. So when you go and talk about inclusion or their voices being heard, they can accept that. I want to say there is that spirit of vengeance that's still out trying to take vengeance because of what they have lost. And the question is, is there any modality that could be put in place to heal these pens and erase the scars so that whatever peace steps we have taken will make an impact? Thank you. We have a question over there as well at the back. Hi, good morning. Thank you very much for this. This is very interesting. My name is Chris Stoller. I'm a senior advisor at the International Republican Institute. I recently took over running the Generation Democracy Network that we run, so I look forward to talking more with you. My question is, we are focused on democratic building, building democracies around the world, civic engagement, getting youth involved in political parties and in government and running for office and voting and why it matters. What I have found is a lot of, since I kind of took over this program, a lot of issues are correlated. So civic engagement leads to economic freedom which leads to peace which, so when we do our Generation Democracy Academies, I think it's more of a, I guess my question is kind of selfish and I'm asking for your advice. Through this research, what kind of cross-cutting themes correlate with our mission of democracy that you found in peace-building that we can involve in our own work through our academies, that are youth led academies? So does anyone would like to take any of the specific or general questions? I will answer the UN question. Yeah, you answer that one. I think your question was very interesting because I came from a place where it has happened a lot for the past 20 years and people have to leave their families, including me, and we have to leave horrible things as my friends Elsa from Nigeria, I know what they are going through. Right now, one of the things that the Civil Society in Venezuela is doing is creating these groups that helps with psychological help. It's not easy for anyone to leave what is happening right now, so trying to just put that weight in your shoulder and be okay sometimes is a lot. So what these groups, those little groups do, they go in the communities and they have pro bono psychologists and psychiatrists and people that are still in Venezuela working in the field and trying to hear those people and give advices and work with them. Most of those people have become members of groups that, as you say, want revenge and they're trying to, you know, crane in these cows that is not going to take us anywhere, but by going to this, I don't say like, you know, we live in like a super peaceful environment, but it helps. And it helps for your daily life to not go crazy because this is a fight and a transition that is not going to get over soon. So we need to get better and very focused on what we are doing and I think like having the help of professionals that work in pro bono, like helping us, like, you know, talking about trauma and healing, healing in size when to help us to heal in our society. And I think that's very important. Yeah, and kind of echoing what Gigi has, I think it's impossible to erase scars. I think that people have lived experiences that they'll carry with them for the rest of their lives. So finding ways to support them to, you know, whether they come together for reconciliation dialogues or have some like whatever it is that they feel that is the appropriate response. So I don't necessarily think it's on the international community to come in and say, you know, you have these wounds and these traumas and these scars and this is how you're going to fix it. I think in our approach generally as a U.S. government entity at USAP is really to give the resources and strengthen the capacity of people who are doing the work that they think is the answer to their challenges or their conflicts. And so, and I would echo kind of Gigi's approach of the importance of professionalism when you're engaging around trauma and like deep, deep scars, which is something that USAP we really don't do much of because we're not situated in that space of professional, like psychological support. And then the question around democracy and political participation for youth, the way that we engage young people is kind of similar in that we have this umbrella of peace building and all of these kind of thematic areas that contribute to an inclusive and peaceful society. And so the way our approach to engaging young people is engaging people in diverse sectors. So we have young people who work in gender, preventing gender-based violence, preventing violent extremism. We also have young people who work in preventing electoral violence, increasing political participation. And generally like on issues related to governance, whether it's relationship building between young people in the security sector. So I think it's the same and we can talk offline about kind of the cross-sectionality of peace building or democracy as a whole. But our approach, again, similar to the kind of trauma and healing is finding organizations that have created their own solutions and supporting them as kind of the, like from the background. So not taking a full, like a front, front of leadership role, playing the support. Thank you very much. Grammel? So a couple of things. The one is, I mean, I think that the progress study recognized because young people spoke about it, this issue of the victimization of young people and their, the issues of associated with not just individual but collective trauma in societies emerging from conflict. So there's a part of the study which says it's very important that we actually think about protective mechanisms, human rights mechanisms, but also psychosocial support and services for young people who are exposed to violence and in societies exposed to violence. I think the second issue is it recognizes because young people spoke about it, the transgenerational, transmission of trauma and the critical issue of youth as one of the vehicles through which that happens. And so this is not just about individual young people's experience, it's about a societal discourse. And I think there's a strong set of recommendations and arguments in the study that deals with these issues of protection but also says young people have to be critical progenitors of how we move that conversation in the way societies deal with their past, the role of young people in transitional justice mechanisms which is partly about institutionalizing the mechanisms for dealing this, but also reparation, the issues around healing, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's a, the value of this is in recognizing again the agency of young people not just their victimization in that exercise although it's also, it's obviously both. I think the study is quite strong on this but there's a lot that needs to be done in developing that and specialized organization engagement. So I think that the way you framed your question on what political participation means for young people goes to the heart of the way in which young people described what for them is meaningful inclusion. And it was very simple. Young people were saying our political exclusion, our economic disempowerment, our loss of trust not just in the polity but in an economic system that marginalizes and excludes us, our sense that education doesn't empower us if it doesn't lead, if it doesn't give us a space where we can exercise what we've learned in the world, the lack of protections of the space in which we organize rights of assembly, participation, civic engagement that a rights framework doesn't protect us and in fact very often we are seen as the potential terrorists and are at risk. Young people described their lived experience of all these things as completely entwined, integrated. They were saying to us, you know, giving us education and think you're going to deal with us or jobs and think you're going to deal with idle hands, the silver bullet for solving the problem of violence not going to work. Actually it's the relationship between these things. Very good research from Mercy Corps illustrates so powerfully that jobs are about meaning, they're about stake, they're about participation. Political inclusion and civic engagement are inextricably intertwined. For young people these questions of how employment, political participation, civic engagement, educational opportunities, these things are seen as an integrated whole. It's very powerful because what it means is that young people force us to think across the silos in which we often segment governance, human rights, development, trauma, whatever it is. Young people say these are integrated holes in our lives. This is a challenge for the UN system because the transversal nature of youth and our youth identity forces us to think about programmatic approaches that cut across the silos that otherwise shape the way we work. I think this is unbelievably creative. I think if that shapes the way we think about what democracy means for lived experience of ordinary people and we start doing it, young people have so much to teach us because of the way they talk about this. So I think this is hugely powerful. And then the last thing I want to say is just I'll leave it to an earlier to answer the question about the UN. But it's really been striking for me. In relation to the ECOSOC Youth Forum, I experienced this when I stepped into a room with the Secretary General and his entire leadership team to talk about the youth peace and security agenda. And I was sort of saying, you know, you guys really need to recognize that there is so much that is intrinsic and this is not unique to the UN. So there is so much that is intrinsic to the way in which we set up protocols for how these things work, the hierarchies of who speaks and for how long, the uniforms in which we have to be clothed in order to get a voice, the culture of our institutional praxis, these are all spectacular bars to young people's free engagement. And they also often shape who the usual suspects are, who we suck into the room. We have to guard against creating a new generation of youth celebrities who become symbolic representatives of the broadening, the participation inclusion. So these are really challenging issues for the culture, not just of the UN, but the way in which governance and institutions work. Young people are challenging the way we think about these things. When we talk about the seismic shifts, this is one of those things, yeah? So quickly on the UN perhaps, just to say that first of all, the UN is all of us. So it's also, you know, member states driven processes leading to the review of a particular agenda, but it's also UN entities, programs, operational activities, entities of the secretariat like the one where you were working in that have their own norms and behaviors and culture, et cetera, that also needs to shift. There is the programmatic work that we push for, the envelope on youth peace and security, the work on the youth's positive role in the context of the 2030 agenda. And there is also, you know, the conversation on the potential youth advisory board or youth engagement platform that you want to set, the discussions on why do we still have and pay the internships, for instance. I mean, why do we not, you know, recognize the fact that we cannot continue to have free labor in the UN system. So these are like different conversations. And in the case of the youth delegates, I have to say they represent their government. So their sphere or perimeter also or their voice will very much depend on what the ministry of their particular country allows them to do as well or the type of conversations that they will take part in or whether they will have the voice or the floor to deliver a statement or not on behalf of their member state. The ECOSOC youth forum is a semi-formal space, meaning that it is something that is really on the agenda of the ECOSOC, but it's not a formal meeting that takes a decision. However, it's become really a space where young people come, bring their experience and also have a space where they can speak truth also to power in terms of SDG implementation, meaning that they will have on their agenda the exact same goals reviewed and discussed that then are reviewed in July by the high-level political forum. So it's not as straightforward, but it's a way to influence the conversation. It's a way to say young people should be involved in the voluntary national reviews that member states are presenting in summer about whether you achieved SDG 4 or SDG 16 and SDG 16 in particular is really at the core of the conversation. Here we're talking justice, we're talking political participation, we're talking whole-of-society approach. This is the heart of the 2030 agenda. This will be the key enabler. If we don't have young people at the heart of decision-making, young people part of use-accountability mechanisms, speaking truths to transparency and anti-corruption issues, being able to contribute to the prevention of violence, we will not succeed. I mean, this 2030 agenda will not succeed. So it's also the recognition that, of course, I mean, at the moment, you may not have a straightforward process where young people as young people can contribute to that, but there are definitely influential spaces for that. Now, when it comes to programming, I mean, we have a number of ways in which we do that. In my organization, we have created as a response to the 2030 agenda and the 2020-50 resolution, the Use Global Program, which is called the Use GPS. Through that, I mean, we support civic engagement and political participation initiatives, youth economic empowerment, the role of youth in resilience building in peace and security, but also in climate action and in contributing to the humanitarian development nexus and the prevention of violent extremism and other issues. So these are like the programmatic actions that we take, but we're also looking at how we're set up and how we hire young people and specific youth leadership programs. For instance, in Sri Lanka, we have a program called the Youth Lead where we hire young people on a number of issues that we work on and not just to talk about youth or work on youth, but to actually feed into our disability program into the social cohesion work, into the work that is being done more broadly on peace building by the Peace Building Support Office or other mechanisms. We're also looking at financing. We didn't mention the financial target, 1.8 billion by 2025, not for anything related to youth, but for specific support to youth lead initiatives. So we need to see a surge in the way we support financially also these initiatives. It's really great to hear about this grant mechanism. Within UNDP, we have the possibility in the context of our programs to also directly have youth lead organizations as implementers, but it's not a common practice. It's not yet a common practice. So we need to be able to work the talk. And for that, it means also that you need to train staff, you need to hear also about their constraints, you need to change the way in which you do business at country level. You need to have regular consultations with young people. You need to be able to map. I mean, who are the young influencers? Who are the young people that have no access to the UN because they don't believe in multilateralism? And I cannot blame them. I mean, it doesn't speak necessarily to their reality. So you need to bridge this gap by opening new channels at all levels. So that means having a consultation mechanisms where you have youth organizations and NGOs and the UN really checking in on a number of issues on a regular basis. All that is not necessarily part of the culture, but I think we're making great progress. We see, I mean, a number of really, we see this next generation of projects really emerging. But of course, as you were saying, participation costs money. And this is also why we need funding. And we need funding for youth-led initiatives, but then we will also need a lot of funding to be able to even provide or convene these spaces. So this financial party is non-negligible. But of course, we can influence a lot of programs that are already being implemented on conflict prevention, on the prevention of violent extremism, on criminal justice, on access to justice in general, on human rights. And we should be able to have not just a youth lens, but really recognize that there is a merit indeed in having 70% of the population of the country you're talking about involved directly with programming. Regardless of who you call, I mean, how you call them when you design your initiative, how can you design a meaningful initiative in a country if you don't have 70% of the population, you know, meaningfully involved or at least their needs embedded in the very initiative that you're trying to design. So it's all this that it's a mix of training also that needs to happen, of change of mindset. And this is the paradigm shift that Ram is calling for. And certainly the UN should lead by example. And the Secretary General also just to reaffirm, I mean, this political commitment at the highest level in the UN has launched a youth strategy in September. And this is being taken very seriously. And in the context of the youth peace and security work with the Global Coalition, we're specifically addressing one of the priority that has to do with the role of young people as agents of peace and resilience. And we're developing this joint action plan. Now, I don't know with how many entities today, but I mean, probably like about 20 or 30 entities, you know, coming together to respond to the missing piece, recommendations, embed the 2030 agenda related targets, make sure that we support country road maps, national coalitions on youth peace and security, and also look at, you know, our own youth leadership programs at our own induction programs, look at our own organizational readiness. So it's really being taken seriously. And I think we need to continue encouraging that. And also, you know, we're not not feeding to the caricature role that sometimes we give to the UN by holistically, you know, talking about that as if it was a single body. I think that there is merit in, you know, unpacking that sometimes. Thank you. So we need to recognize the presence of Mark Somers here, who's also a member of the advisory groups, advisory group of experts on youth peace and security that was appointed by the secretary general, this 21-person magnificent group that was working with Graham on the missing piece. Mark, please. Thank you. Thanks, Noella. Am I the only one here from the group? No, just you. Just me. Okay. Well, I speak for the 21. I think for, first of all, I think that this study is absolutely groundbreaking. And I think that as you talked about with the UN, Noella, the fact that there are, you know, these governments signing on to effectively endorsing this, endorsing this report even states that are well known for repressing youth, I think is groundbreaking. And I think it's an advocacy tool for all of us to use. And so I really, you know, I think that this is a very daring report that forces everyone to think differently about not just young people but governance. I'm listening to some of the, just an observation and then a question from the study just to get a different sort of side. We've been talking a lot about youth-led initiatives. I think it's important to realize that youth aren't waiting for us because they can't in a lot of places. And youth are at the vanguard of injustice. And I mean, today Bashir is no longer in power in Sudan. Well, youth and women were, I think, 70 or 80% of all demonstrators in Khartoum and other cities in Sudan. Youth were at the forefront in Aromia, in Ethiopia, which without them there wouldn't be Abbey in Ethiopia. In Burkina Faso, there was, you know, that led to a change in power in Venezuela. I mean, there's a lot of places. People are taking mighty risks and a lot of them are youth. But I want to talk about the state and governance again. You know, youth-led organizations were at the forefront of the Arab Spring in Egypt. Most of those leaders are in prison. Most of those organizations were wiped out. When the crisis started in Burundi, one of the first groups that the government went after were youth musicians, hip-hop and other kinds of singers, because they were speaking, bringing out the youth voice about what it's like to be a young person in Burundi, and they're all in hiding or out of the country. So, you know, youth are a lot of important things. They're also under attack because they're all these important things. So, I guess I think as outsiders coming in, just working with youth organizations is not going to cut it. And it's good. It's necessary but insufficient. And I think something that has come out of this study that I think I wanted to just get all of you to respond to, but it's, you know, Graham has mentioned this, has to do with state violence against youth. And that youth are much more afraid of their governments than violent extremist groups. That's a big idea. And I think, you know, this is a UN study. They signed on this. And then they thump youth in a lot of places. And a lot of places you can't have youth-led organizations that aren't, if they're not underground. And sometimes that's the most important work of all. So, I just wanted to get a sense of, what do we do about these states that are terrorizing young people and aren't allowing them? I mean, if we could just support youth organizations and it all worked out, that'd be fabulous. But that's not the way it is in a lot of states. And so, I just wanted to throw that back to you and have us think more broadly about, you know, the big challenge, or one of the really big challenges, which is these states and how threatened they are by having these super-useful populations, and they're not, you know, seen as credible governments. It's a big problem. They're not seen as legitimate. They don't represent most of their society in what they do. So, what do we do about that as outsiders? What's our role? What's our responsibility on that one? Thank you. That's a big question. And it's a great question to grapple with and interested to hear what you all think. My inclination is that youth rights are also human rights. And when there are human right abuses, that's that there are formal mechanisms to address that. And that at the state level, there could be, there should be pressure and holding people accountable to the agreements that they have signed on to. At the same time, I don't work in that, like I don't work at that level. And so, like, how does the, how do you hit the pavement and run on that is a bigger question that would love to hear your thoughts. I think, Grim. Gigi? Yeah. I think it's a great question. And especially because it resonates with my personal story. So in 2016, I have to leave Venezuela because the work that I was doing was getting very dangerous. So the last thing that I did was stop working for freedom and peace in Venezuela. I still do it, but I cannot do it in the ground anymore. So what you mentioned about, like, the state's perpetrating violence for youth organizations is 100% a problem, especially in a society as mine. In Venezuela, like, civil society has to be underground. But what it can be done, like, from the outside, is not stopping the support. Like, support, like, financial support, resources, like, even, like, you don't have access to any type of, like, books or anything. Like, if you can find channels or mechanism to make the information be inside those countries, it will be as help. I think that the worst thing we can do is, like, saying, oh, no, let's just not, let's just not help them or just not take into consideration. I think, like, the least thing you can do helps by, like, spreading the cause. Like, you don't have idea how much it helps for, like, the Venezuelan organizations. Like, think tanks in the U.S. or media in the U.S. to talk about our work. Because it amplifies the message. It amplifies the impact. I remember the first elections that we won as the youth movement in 2015 was mainly because of the international support. It was talking about everything the U.S. student movement, the U.S. student movement, World Civil Journal, like, New York Times, like, the European Union, everyone was talking about it. And that created a pressure inside. And it helped. And I think support, like, underground movements, like, support, like, NGOs that cannot be public, but it can be found by several, like, organizations in the States. And support also, like, spreading the message, in the right message. Like, the right message that comes from the people in the ground. I often hear people talking about Venezuela with a completely different narrative. That is very dangerous. And I think one of the things you want as an international, like, helper is talk about, like, an experience that you are not living. So, like, call the people in the ground. Cry the people in the ground. How you're doing. What is really going to happen? Like, what is happening and trying to work from that? Do we have more questions? Yes. Heather, thank you very much for this panel. My name is Ben Perdue and I'm from Street Law, Inc. And we deal with democracy issues as well. And I wanted to specifically dive into a little more detail about some of your recommendations about education, which you've mentioned a number of times, and certainly making the educational process, and particularly in terms of policy, more inclusive, is important. But the work that we do is sort of a little bit more on the grassroots fundamental level and making actual classrooms and actual spaces where youth are sitting in more inclusive. The experience that we've had a lot is that a typical classroom kind of anywhere in the world, even in many cases here in the U.S. as well, is an adult at the front of the room sort of dumping knowledge into the empty heads of kids who are sitting around. At least that's sort of the perception. And there's no interaction even within the classroom. And in the same way that you can't teach someone how to swim by lecturing at them, you can't really teach someone how to be an effective citizen by lecturing at them. So I wonder if there are any sort of particular recommendations about how education can be more inclusive and can sort of listen more and be more interactive for the youth, both in the formal education and in formal education as well. Thank you. I'm Alex from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. I have two questions. One, as Graham mentioned, the support needed for alternative nonviolent forms of masculinity. So I wanted to ask how we can meaningfully engage in this exercise. And second question is more for Gigi about social media since you mentioned. It can be very empowering. But of course, Graham also mentioned one of the challenges. And there's many more challenges. Sometimes they are just challenges that we have in the society and are amplified by social media. But for instance, in your work, how do you engage with tackling these challenges? Thank you very much. My name is Samuel and I'm from the OSCE as well. We sit together because we cooperate together. I'm the special representative of the chairperson in office on youth and security. And actually, I just would like to react shortly. First of all, this idea of the USIP having the youth advisory council, I think is a great idea. The OSCE, for example, and that's part of the question I would like to also build upon what Christina said from Romania, right? So the OSCE, for example, we have 16 field missions in Central Asia, Balkans, and Eastern Europe. And in some of them, we have the youth advisory groups that participate and which advise the OSCE missions in these countries. So this is like a better field in one front, which we have. So it's from, let's say, bottom up. So the OSCE then receives the information from the field operations. And then the other field is, let's say, from top down, what we do in Vienna. So we advise the secretary general, the secretary general, to put more emphasis and to talk more about the youth business security agenda. And let me tell you, it's not easy. It's not easy. And this participation of young people and how they see their participation in the OSCE, it's not easy at all. Because we're also still trying to find the space for them. Nonetheless, it is a great progress, because we have the OSCE security agenda within the OSCE at all. We did not have youth focal points which we have in each mission. We have, right in secretariat, we have in chairmanship office for the past four chairmanship if I'm right. So there is a huge progress. However, we are still struggling also with some countries because we have the OSCE resolution on youth business security. Nonetheless, we did not manage to find peace and security from grammar. We failed in that. Because there were two, maybe three countries which were opposing this. Even though they noted that, yes, the UN resolution on youth business security, both of them, they noted it. But regarding the study, and we wanted to have it there, we failed. So it's not easy. So this is the struggle we have. We have to find peace and security in the OSCE. We have to find peace and security in the OSCE. And indeed, as Marc said, it's a great advocacy tool, this study, and it helps us a lot. But, yeah, mission is not accomplished yet. Thank you. Perhaps just to say something on that, in the context of the forum we had a number of site events and one of them was a high event event. We had a panel of members of this course, but also the content of this discourse really evolving positively. I think that there is a recognition by definitely, I mean, we had a panel of permanent member states, a permanent member. We had an incoming member to the Security Council. We had an incoming member to the Security Council. And frankly, it's quite remarkable to see how serious they're taking it, including in the context of their own processes, trying to seize the ARIA formula, trying to really use a number of tools that is at their dispositions, having systematically more young briefers on country discussions, in-country reports. We had a panel of members of the Security Council, and of course, you will always have some member states that would consider that it should not be dealt with in the context of the Security Council or in the context of specific bodies in the UN or in other organizations, but what matters also is what practically is happening in the field. We have ministerial roundtables reflect positively on the progress study, but also fund a lot of these programs that operational activities are implementing, and I see that we see a very positive trend there as well, including at the political level. Just to say that. We still have the question on education, the question on social media, on the digital divide, and a question in the chat box, and then we'll go back, we'll revert to the panel, and then you were waiting also. Yes, we'll take two more questions, and then we'll go back to the panel and then we'll invite our distinguished colleague from Search for Common Ground that we're very privileged to have with us, Haji. Thank you very much. I'm Bob Berg, I chair the panel. And I have to preface the fact that I'm going to question the UN, but I've been senior advisor to four different parts of the UN, so I don't think I'm here to challenge the existence of the UN. But the question about protecting youth, I think to me relates to the failure that we in the international arena have had in protecting civil society. And I'm just a pathetic reaction to the challenge of civil society around the world. So, for example, there's a new president of the World Bank, I'm urging them to say to the new president, will you say that when countries deteriorate in their treatment of civil society that that has something to do with how the bank assesses in terms of your accountability and your transparency of governance. And I say the same thing about the UN. The UN frankly has been silent on the persecution of civil society. It is even harder for civil society organizations to operate within the UN now than it used to be. More closed door meetings and so forth. So I'm wondering whether you have ideas about how the UN can fend for civil society more. And the second thing is I think we have to be candid among ourselves that SDG 16 is not going to get us very far. It is just off base in promoting peace and inclusion as it should be. And I'm not sure where the high level review is going to go on this because those of us who say you have to open up and reconfigure SDG 16, I'm going to leave it where it is. The question I think is how can we more centrally define the ingredients for promoting peace and where do we get that done if it's not within 16? Great. Start. Aubrey, Gigi, Graham. I think there are a lot of questions but we'll come back to you because we're going to forget the questions otherwise. Okay, I was rather you and Gigi spoke because I'm long winded. I mean there are a few things. So someone talked about and I'm sorry I forget but the reference was made to young people's participation in advisory councils on the roles of structures. I'll highlight one issue that comes out of the study really strongly and that is that when young people were talking about what meaningful participation, what meaningful inclusion looks like they were saying this is not unconditional. They're saying there are some context in which participation youth councils or youth parliaments or delegated youth authorities is meaningful because they have real connections into the source of power, they have opportunities through that. They are truly representative or aspire to. There are other situations where these are vehicles for controlling young people, for making sure that political parties can handpick the young people that have a voice, for manipulating them and for using them tokenistically and symbolically. And I think this is very important because it means there's no one size fits all here that young people themselves are saying that they are about systems of patronage that are entrenching elite corrupt et cetera et cetera and that includes in peace processes where the boundaries of who's at the table is often those with guns rather than those who are progenitors of peace building. So there's a really powerful critical voice here from young people which is saying when we talk about participation and inclusion we have to be really careful of the capacity of governments to check the box, to say we're doing this to actually use this to manipulate and control youth. I mean young people saying to us we are trotted out to wave our flags at election time and parties want us to do that and we have to resist that narrow thing. I think that's very important because it's a defence and it's a recognition both of the civil society space of the different ways in which we need to enable, protect and empower the spaces that young people occupy in youth organisations but in civil society organisations more generally in women's organisations in diverse forms and I do think there's a strong voice in the study and a strong assertion of the issues of a rights framework and the protection of young people and I think Mark you'll recognise this it was very loud and clear that this wasn't just about protecting young people from physical violations, the physical that are very important that require this but it was about an assertion of the protection of the space that's occupied, rights of assembly, rights of participation rights of dissent and in fact young people claiming and asserting that so often the issues of young people's peaceful protest and dissent is seen as such a threat that the discourse around violent extremism and counter-terrorism and the people in Central America saying to us we used to be, you know, targeted because we were seen as potential gangsters now we're targeted because we're all terrorists and there's a global discourse that has shifted the space on this that has closed the space and so the discourse and the power of young people's voice in demanding protection that is different that's protection of assembly that's protection of human rights protection of socio-economic rights of the environment and the role of young people defending the environment from violation I think this all goes I don't think it solves the question it reaffirms what I think Bob said about that space and the importance of it but it also lends I think a view of how a new generation frustrated by the deceit, deception generally in some ways of the older generation to do this is reclaiming that space and the youth peace and security agenda lends itself to an affirmation of that to using this as another tool for getting into the conversation about how we need to do that so I think that's very important two things on the issue of masculinity and the question around that I think this is a really rich articulation I mean it's best in the voice of young people themselves one of the powerful voices was a young man who was a gang member in Honduras who's saying I'm 24 years old you want to talk to me about gender based violence and negative forms of mask violent forms of masculinity you're about 15 years too late and I don't think there's a clear set of proposals in the study around this there's an urgency for engaging with it there's a rich assertion that this is part of the gender conversation that we need to have and there's also a recognition that sometimes the language of toxic masculinity tense all men in that way and we need to recognize that we're in exactly the way we've talked about how young people occupy these spaces differently how young men and this was powerful you know we had young transgender people in in one of the focus groups saying we are the primary targets of victimization in our country Brazil we need to stop talking about gender in binary terms and this is hard to get this stuff into international policy documents and we tiptoe around those who will be offended and young people are demanding this and so it's in there but it was really interesting I think that the discourse with young people saying we need to start thinking about early intervention models it was very fascinating for me that actually young people were quite resistant to a narrow approach to education as a pathway into employment as a pathway into vocational opportunities often saying actually the gap between what we taught and how we can use it is more of a source of frustration than anything else powerful research that fed the study of young people talking about education as aspirational as opening the world and the environment of the world to people learning has a different set of functions powerful suggestions from young people that we need to start talking about peace education and education for peace powerful assertions of how we need to start thinking about integrating formal and non-formal vehicles for education and recognizing the role of civil society actors as critical educators et cetera et cetera that opens it up rather than closes it down as a we are not economic automatons please recognize our aspirations our belief and also the educational conversation shaped by young people saying globalization has changed has moved the horizons on what young people can see and the way they relate to the world the perceptions of horizontal inequality all we need is a cell phone to see these things so there's a sense of opportunity the sense of saying open that space treating it as a narrow one and the vision of saying early intervention models values based education working with younger and younger children that's how you're going to get to the issues of masculinity and crafting alternative views so I think again the richness of what young people are teaching us about this is so empowering any more reactions questions would you like to would you like to also perhaps give a one minute sort of wrap up so I think the education and social media part in my case in Venezuela is very important like 20 years ago our education system completely changed so instead of like being and you go to school to be a better person or like be a good citizen you go to be a militant of like a political party so what happened is like with the years of civil society especially youth organization shift the conversation to non-conventional ways of education and this is can be into two parts one civil society has to say as educators like people go to specific like NGOs or groups or communities to learn things that they want learning school or second on the internet so there's like all these platforms that can give you a more broad curriculum that you won't find at school in Venezuela right now and then that's tied up with like the social media like a lot of the work that we're doing in youth organization in Venezuela is teaching in a very simple way things in social media for example in Venezuela right now it's like a big big big economic crisis people go to the store with let's say ten dollars to buy milk three days later it costs one hundred dollars so people don't get that that's called hyperinflation but because people is not educated enough like in the education that's explained to us what hyperinflation is the role that we're taking right now in youth organizations trying to explain people what inflation is how you can help combat it at home but you can help yourself like creating a budget or maybe like spending all the money at once trying to create like kind of like tips to people online explaining what is economic policy what inflation is created like it's really like the United States falls because that's what you read in the newspaper oh yeah the inflation is one million percent because United States and that's like that's not what inflation is so people now you are seeing in the street like with a simple infographic say oh so this is why inflation is happening this is like the leader of milk is like more expensive it's actually not like a conspiracy to see it's like simple economic policy that was implemented by a group of people like in this year so I think connecting those things and empowering people to actually be more engaged with not conventional ways of education is a good way to go would you like to give any concluding remarks I just want to thank everyone to come and I think this study is very very useful I read the Spanish version of it and I think I will share with colleagues like some special recommendation that is important to use and I know that this is like a study that was created like yeah with the help of the UN but we can we can own those recommendations in our daily life too you know like empowering young people in your work in your office in your family like if you have a young girl like encourage her to go to college not like because she's a girl she's not going to have opportunities or give the voice to your member of your organization I think that's the most important thing great Graham nothing else to say perhaps just perhaps then one thing on this data I mean all the data that fed into the progress study I mean most of the reports from the consultations from the focus group discussions are online all the thematic papers on the youth for peace platform so feel free also to dig you know this data and information because it can be very relevant to your particular context as well Aubrey just to echo what Samuel said is that there's a long way to go in this space and we're making important contributions through the security council resolution through the progress study and I think there's still like we're just starting and so trying to find ways to integrate these recommendations into your organizations into your advocacy work there's a long road ahead and I think the more champions we can have in this space the better also just want to say thank you to the people who joined us via Webcam I know that events in Washington aren't always accessible so we're glad that you are here virtually. Thank you very much and thanks for hosting us we will now give the floor to Saji just to give some concluding remarks Saji Preilis the director of youth and children in search for common ground has been a critical champion of the youth peace and security agenda before it was even called youth peace and security agenda and you're also the co-chair of the global coalition on youth peace and security that was referred to several times here so Saji very quickly please two minutes we started live that's right but I just want to acknowledge thank you for the presentations and the information shared as the co-chair of the global coalition it's a coalition of actors from the UN and the national NGOs youth led organizations and the common world and we have friends who are here friends and partners from the African Union Rooks and OSCE also joining us I'm really grateful for you coming here to be part of this discussion I just want to have three reflecting points one is the idea of the state and the role the state plays in shutting civic space and also threatening young people in the community the security council resolution when we first started it people laughed at us young people's issues are not security issues that was in 2008-2009 but now you have an increasing number of member states who are starting to champion this so Aubrey is right it takes time this is a long journey, this is not a quick fix and also to Mark's question 20 to 50 also is connected to the Rome statues in the international criminal code this is that in mind as you think it's not 1325 20 to 50 actually has connections to the Rome statues as well so that's one point to keep in mind second point I wanted to make is that the progress study is the first of its kind it cannot die here the next report is a UN report that is coming from the Secretary General next year that will only be a UN report so to compliment that amazing report that a shadow report is done a shadow report that brings a life of young people's efforts to the forefront it's been partnership with civil society needs to happen and that's our task to make sure that happens in partnership with the EU and other civil society actors in the room and the third I think is as we look down the road there's a lot happening we are seeing how there's a lot of changes happening within peace processes for example before we think peace processes are closed like Graham said to men with guns and men in power but here now that is starting to open up with the Security Council that adopted last year now we have a conversation with governments supporting it mind you that was the only thing in the resolution language that all member states approved peace process is one of the only things that almost all member states in the Security Council kept that's significant so that means there's an interest in seeing how young people play a role in peace processes there's a policy paper that's coming out in the next couple of weeks that articulate what Graham said how young people are playing a role in the room, around the room and outside the room in peace processes specifically a closed space but we are coming out with evidence to see how young people are playing a role so this is significant so why we have a long ways to go we already are building a very firm foundation but we can't do this alone we need partners to come on board because one mistake we want to avoid is to do this thousand points of light effort saying search for common ground is doing it here UN is doing it here Interpeace is doing it there USIP is doing it here that's not going to solve this problem we need to work collectively and collaborate to make this happen it's foolish for us to think we can do it alone the challenges ahead are enormous that is why the global coalition of UN, AU intergovernmental bodies like the Commonwealth and others are coming together with civil society and youth to make this change happen and we need you to join us otherwise we cannot move this needle forward in a way that addresses huge challenges ahead so we really want you to come and join us that conversation can happen right after this outside the room we can continue this storytelling and conversations to be part of this movement moving forward so thank you for all