“This current generation of young people sees a world in which their future is compromised in multiple ways,” wrote the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his Our Common Agenda report. “At the same time, we have the capacity to think for the longer term more than ever before.” Youth have a vital role to play in helping larger and larger numbers of people coalesce around a shared vision of their desired future. Young people have proven their ability to help local communities take practical steps to translate that shared vision into reality. Learning from and expanding such efforts, in localities around the world, must be at the heart of the upcoming Summit of the Future, Pact for the Future, and similarly forward-looking processes. 

Young people today are coming of age in the midst of a deeply unsettled era. Much that was assumed to be certain and settled is now being questioned, and there is widespread acknowledgement that present-day structures are ill-prepared to address the needs of the future, let alone the present. Not unlike an individual person navigating the turbulent yet promising period of adolescence, humanity is being challenged to leave behind the limited ways of its collective childhood and equip itself for an age whose challenges and opportunities increasingly demand the wisdom and responsibility of maturity. In a parallel process of coming of age themselves, young people have a crucial role to play in helping humanity navigate its own passage to maturity. Though conversations on the role of youth in society, and the future of humanity, are not synonymous—indeed, they are all too often confused and conflated—each nevertheless shapes and is shaped by the other, and both need to advance hand-in-hand. 

Movements for social change can find it difficult to formulate a truly forward-looking vision of the future. Many struggle to paint a picture of what is to come more meaningful than modified versions of present paradigms. A deficit of imagination thus emerges as one of the primary obstacles to be overcome in advancing meaningful transformation. Young people have vital contributions to make in the creative endeavor needed to address this challenge. Less attached to the systems and norms of the status quo, which they had little role in establishing, youth tend to have more mental, emotional, and imaginative space to conceptualize alternatives and put them into practice. By virtue of their stage of life, they enjoy a certain freedom from the assumptions, disappointments, and attachments that can constrain the thinking of more established colleagues. 

Yet it is important to avoid romanticizing or essentializing young people. Certain young populations, for example, might well find it difficult to escape attachment to conditions of privilege, position, or access to resources into which they were born. Young people who are well established in the multilateral system, perhaps serving in roles of leadership or visibility, will similarly need to be clear that the work at hand is not to excel at playing the game as it stands, but rather building a new one, with better rules and a wider base of players. This is a prospect that calls for significant detachment, humility, and selflessness on the part of many young people.

Any society’s vision of itself and its future is inextricably tied to its attitudes toward youth. Systems for the education and training of young people, for example, both reflect and reproduce particular conceptions of society. An educational system primarily oriented around preparing young people to earn, purchase, produce, and consume reinforces movement toward a certain kind of future characterized by particular qualities and challenges; education organized around other social priorities facilitates progress toward different aims and ends. The way that a population views the qualities and characteristics of youth themselves is similarly connected to its sense of identity and collective purpose. “The way that a community views youth is a reflection of the community itself,” noted one young practitioner from Zambia. “If the community has no vision of itself, no sense of direction, then youth will be seen as a menace, a source of crime, and so on. But if there is a sense of future in the community, a sense of direction and progress, then young people are seen as resources. They are seen as the energy that is going to move the community toward its destination.” 

Young people are often characterized as the leaders of tomorrow or today, but their impact on society extends far beyond formal roles, positions, and mandates. What the generality of a society’s young people do or don’t do shapes the way its elements are organized, the way its communities function, and the progress it is able to make or not. In very real ways, the future possibilities open to any population depend on how its young people view the role of their generation in society and what purpose shapes their individual and collective actions. A development of concern in this regard is the number of parents, teachers, social workers, activists, and youth themselves who report growing levels of hopelessness among young people, both those in resource-rich circumstances, who fear impending breakdown and feel impotent to avert it, and those in conditions of greater deprivation, who fear that the hardships they face will never change. Youth in numerous circumstances are increasingly weary for want of a pattern of life to which to aspire. Yet many are also coming to find hope in the contributions they can make to society and the development of new models of living together that are needed now more than ever. 

People of all ages increasingly desire a vision of the future in which every member of the society is taking responsibility for navigating the path forward. The proposition that certain regions of the world, or small groups of elites within each society, would determine the way forward on behalf of everyone else, according to their own perspectives and preferences, is increasingly recognized as a relic of the past, better left behind. In conversations about the future, as much as in any other at the UN, youth perspectives are integral to the process beyond diversity and proximity to future generations, but because of their inherent, meaningful contribution. At the international stage, actors across various entities need to discuss how we hope the world will look in 50 or 100 years time. The capacity of young people to imagine this future, with their detachment from current structures, is vital in a world facing multiple challenges. Thinking far out into the future forces us to let go of current assumptions, ways of doing and thinking—something which younger generations are uniquely equipped to do.