In this video, Prof Scherto Gill offers an outline of her presentation at 2025 Inner Development Goals Summit, focusing on exploring the four processes of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, including an intergenerational approach to leadership as healership.
On October 16th, at the IDG Summit, Track 6 – Healing the Roots of What Drives Us Apart, will explore how trauma-informed leadership can open pathways for systemic healing, peacebuilding, and societal defragmentation. This digital track is an immersive journey into the root causes of polarisation and healing collective trauma, blending trauma science, conflict transformation, and embodied leadership.
Through live group process, reflective practice, artistic embodiment, and narrative tracking, participants will witness how inner development practices can transform fragmentation into collective insight and how to embed this wisdom in leadership, organisations, and society.
Prof Scherto Gill reflected on the question “What does it take to heal the deep divisions of our world today?” By tracing the development and processes of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, the presentation brings forward communities across four continents experiences engaging in an intergenerational approach to shifting from trauma towards flourishing. This involves facing the wounds of injustice with courage, rediscovering ancestral wisdom with curiosity, nurturing new ways of belonging with compassion, and envisioning well-being futures with care.
This makes the case for why the intergenerational processes of collective healing are not abstract, but involve essential inner capacities of transforming leadership as healer-ship.
On 19th September, scholars, researchers and practitioners gathered in Mansfield College, Oxford, for a workshop on Intergenerational Dialogue for Well-Being Futures. This event was co-convened in partnership with the Journal of Dialogue Studies, which will publish a special issue (Vol. 14, 2025) on the same theme.
My motivation for guest-editing this issue arises from five years of work with the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. At the heart of Initiative are the Collective Healing Circles (CHCs), intergenerational spaces created in communities across Africa, the Americas, and Europe. In these circles, people of all ages come together to acknowledge historical mass atrocities, recognise continued wounds, reclaim ancestral wisdom and human dignity, transcend divisions, and co-imagine shared flourishing. They have shown me both the transformative potential and the challenges of intergenerational dialogue and inspired me to bring these questions into wider academic and policy exploration.
A workshop structured as a journey
Following an inspiring keynote from Youssef Mahmoud, former UN Under-Secretary-General, the academic workshop’s programme followed a deliberate arc:
Contexts – situating dialogue in linguistic, historical, ethical, grassroots, digital, and spiritual arenas.
Conceptualisations – examining how intergenerational dialogue is conceived epistemologically, ethically, and culturally, and how it can serve healing, and transformation.
Practices – exploring how dialogue is enacted and transmitted through arts, memory, and creative media.
Futures – considering how intergenerational dialogue might serve as a foundation for justice, solidarity, and flourishing societies.
This progression created space not only for rich scholarly exchange, but also for deep reflection on the ethical, methodological, and political dimensions of dialogue across generations.
Insights across the sessions
Several themes resonated across the day:
Transmission and transformation: Dialogue mediates the tension between preserving ancestral wisdom and inherited knowledge and transforming it for the future.
Agency and co-authorship: Who has the authority to decide what is remembered, transmitted, or reinterpreted? Intergenerational dialogue demands genuine co-authorship.
Dialogue as ethical practice: Listening, translation, ritual, and creativity are not just methods, but ethical commitments.
Challenges of reconciliation: Dialogues are often uncomfortable — grappling with guilt, silence, or denial — yet necessary for relational repair.
Futures through justice: Dialogue is not only about the past; it is a path to recognition, resilience, and flourishing futures.
One aspect that remains insufficiently addressed is the overwhelming domination of structural injustice, which continues to define the lived experience of the global majority. While academic research offers decolonial critique and systemic analysis, the challenge ahead lies in reimagining global governance that can respond to these realities.
Looking ahead
For me, one of the most moving aspects of the workshop was how much it echoed the spirit of the UNESCO Collective Healing Circles. We saw how dialogue is never neutral: it carries risks of stereotyping or tokenising, but also profound possibilities for recognition, resilience, and transformation. We saw how young people are not simply listeners or translators, but co-creators of meaning and futures. And we saw how elders are not only custodians of memory, but partners in reshaping change.
As we move forward, the next step is to revise and deepen the papers in light of the workshop conversations. Guided by the Journal of Dialogue Studies framework, the special issue will ensure that contributions are theoretically rich, methodologically and ethically strong, and — most importantly — relevant to the question at the heart of our gathering: how intergenerational dialogue can nurture well-being futures in contexts marked by structural injustice.
I am grateful to all who joined us in Oxford, for your generosity, insights, and presence. This is not the end, but part of a continuing journey to explore and enact intergenerational dialogue as a vital resource for our shared futures.
The Journal of Dialogue Studies, in partnership with the GHfP Institute, the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace and UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative, invites contributions for a special issue exploring the role of intergenerational dialogue in shaping collective well-being futures.
We recognise that despite global commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), progress remains impeded by persistent barriers, including transgenerational trauma, structural injustice, gender inequality, limited youth engagement, and fragmented political responses. In the face of these obstacles, intergenerational dialogue is increasingly important as it creates facilitated spaces for younger and older people to encounter and learn from each other. Such dialogue allows the community to draw insights from multiple generations, diverse cultural traditions, and rich cosmological worldviews towards building better futures.
This special issue is inspired by the power and potential of intergenerational dialogue. It is a response to the call of the United Nations Pact for the Future, which underscores the necessity of equitable intergenerational processes and collaborative approaches to multilateral governance to ensure sustainable peace, structural justice, and inclusive well-being.
This year, the GHfP Institute has engaged in a global study, commissioned by UNESCO, to explore youth’s needs for leadership development. What marks this research unique is that it has involved youth co-researchers throughout, from identifying research questions, to designing the research questionnaire, from hosting focus-groups, to analysing the data and identifying themes and proposing recommendations. Furthermore, this global study intentionally focuses on the voices of youth from marginalised communities.
Over 1,500 young people across every world region contributed to this research through a desk review, survey questionnaire, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. Their message is clear: leadership must be reimagined. No longer hierarchical, elitist, or tokenistic, youth envision leadership as relational, dialogical, and futures-forming — a practice that is grounded in care for people and the planet. In fact, this study reveals that young people are already leading change today, often under extraordinary constraints, and more importantly, they are leading with visions of justice, dignity, and well-being that the world urgently needs to hear.
What Youth Told Us
Their concerns are urgent and overlapping. From climate change and unemployment to gender-based violence, mental health, and political exclusion, young people confront intersecting crises every day.
They are already leading. In their communities, youth are mobilising for climate justice, creating safe spaces, preserving culture, and challenging systemic injustice.
Barriers are structural, not personal. Youth are not held back by a lack of talent or ambition, but by ageism, tokenism, underfunding, weak civic spaces, and exclusionary education systems.
They know what enables leadership. Trust, mentorship, intergenerational solidarity, sustained resources, and spaces of safety and belonging emerged as essential conditions for flourishing.
They are re-framing leadership itself. Leadership, they argue, is not about power over others, but about dialogue, shared responsibility, and accountability to future generations.
A Blueprint for Futures-Forming Leadership
From these insights, the study distilled:
Three imperatives: address systemic injustice, strengthen intergenerational solidarity, and reimagine governance for the common good.
Five values: collective well-being, dialogue, relationality, justice, and responsibility to future generations.
Seven proposals: practical recommendations from youth, ranging from experiential learning and mentoring to sustainable funding and co-governance structures.
Together, these constitute a youth-authored blueprint for leadership that is capable of meeting the challenges of our time.
A Call to Action
Young people are not asking for charity. They are calling for recognition, resources, and authentic partnership. They ask institutions to:
Institutionalise youth co-governance.
Secure long-term funding and seed grants.
Embed youth leadership into UNESCO and partners’ core systems.
Build decentralised hubs for exchange and solidarity.
Leverage partnerships across sectors to scale impact.
Why This Matters
Leadership for the future cannot be postponed. The crises we face are urgent, and the creativity and courage of youth are already shaping the path forward. What is needed now is not another round of rhetoric, but a living covenant between generations — a commitment to co-create futures where dignity, justice, and flourishing are shared by all.
UNESCO’s Futures-Forming Leadership Report amplifies the voices of young people. The responsibility lies with us — institutions, funders, educators, policymakers — to act on what they have said.
Because youth are not the leaders of tomorrow. They are the leaders of today.
In the Department of Cauca, south of Popayán, the Estrella Roja Humanitarian Camp, established during the 2021 Social Outbreak, has emerged as an organizational experience sustained by community self-management and the leadership of women, youth, and diverse families who defend life, territory, and dignity.
As part of the implementation of the Collective Healing Circles Program, an artistic project called “Golden Patches” has been developed, which constitutes a strategy of memory, expression, and collective care.
The activity brings together adult and older women, along with young women and girls, who, gathered in simple community spaces, work with needles, fabrics, and golden threads. Each participant uses a scrap of fabric from personal items that have accompanied their lives, on which they embroider simple and deeply meaningful symbols. These embroideries express their resistance to displacement, gender violence, social exclusion, and urban precariousness, as well as the inner treasures cultivated amidst these experiences.
The images that result from this exercise—trees, roots, flowers, and hearts—reflect the community’s resilience and spiritual strength. Each golden stitch becomes an act of healing and a recognition of the inner strength that has allowed them to resist and transform pain.
The embroidered fragments will be compiled in a collective golden book, presented on community altars as a tribute to shared struggles, living memories, and the hope built collectively.
The Mendiendos Dorados process is more than a craft practice: it constitutes a living heritage, a way of narrating memory and affirming dignity through symbolic and spiritual languages that strengthen community bonds.
Global Humanity for Peace Institute, is delighted to have invited applications for the 2025 Young Changemakers Programme (YCP), a unique international opportunity for young people aged 19–27 to develop their potential as changemakers.
2025 marks the Catholic Jubilee. It invites us to embrace forgiveness, share hope, and aspire towards renewal. In this spirit, this year’s Young Changemakers Programme (YCP) will be held in Rome, offering young participants an inspiring and transformative learning journey. Through a circular itinerary that weaves together encounter, experience, inquiry, and action, the YCP seeks to foster participants’ self-awareness, mutual appreciation, and a deeper understanding of both local and global challenges.
Building on the innovative pedagogies of the Pontifical Foundation Scholas Occurrentes , University of Meaning , and Global Humanity for Peace Institute at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David , the YCP seeks to make learning relevant to participants’ personal and professional development, as well as youths’ needs for contributing to social transformation.
On 29th June, Prof Scherto Gill provided a closing keynote lecture at the Scientific and Medical Network’s 2025 Annual Gathering, entitled: Love: Mediating the Earthly and the Heavenly,Integrating the Immanent and the Transcendent. Other speakers at this event were Prof Federico Faggin and Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown.
In her lecture, Scherto sets the challenge in an era defined by profound tensions, stark oppositions and fragmenting contradictions. While unprecedented technological and material abundance enriches the lives of a small minority, pervasive deprivation, both economic and environmental, continues to diminish the lives of the majority. Whereas monetary wealth is pursued as precious goods, nature’s beauty and goodness are being irreversibly destroyed. Claiming to seek growth beyond human constraint, modern life often ignores the value and wonder of grounded everyday experiences, such as the depth of friendship, the delight of gardening, the inspiration of the creating and appreciating arts, the awe of nature, and the joy of living in congenial political communities.
She then asks: what if the very tensions and paradoxes we face hold the key to a richer and more integrated life? How might we bridge these oppositions and restore a vital connection between our immediate, earthly living and transcendent aspirations?
In pursuit of answers, she turns to Diotima of Mantineia, whose teachings on love, as depicted in Plato’s Symposium, offer profound insights into harmonising these opposing realms. Most of us are familiar with Plato’s ladder of love, a vision of ascending from possessing physical beauty and attraction towards the seeking spiritual and eternal goodness or beauty itself. This is typically described as a transcendent vision. Yet Diotima’s insight goes further, inviting us not merely to ascend but to integrate, honouring every rung of experience as essential and sacred, in an infinite process of creative becoming.
The lecture delves deeper into Diotima’s teachings, particularly her conception of Erôs as a daimon, a powerful spirit neither wholly divine nor simply mortal, born of Poros, the god of abundance, and Penia, a mortal embodying poverty. This symbolic lineage endows Erôs with both creative potential and persistent need, perpetually dwelling in the vibrant tension between gratification and longing, contentment and aspiration.
Through engaging dialogue and reflective practices, her session further explores how embracing this daimonic tension can help mediate contemporary divides. Scherto asks the participants to consider how recognising and honouring the inherent goodness, beauty, and creative possibility within our everyday, our earthly lived experiences can bridge us towards transcendent ideals and values, enriching our personal, communal and political life in peace.
Scherto Gill, Director, Global Humanity for Peace Institute
During 2025 Well-Being Economy Forum, held on 8-9 May in Reykjavik, Iceland, I had a unique opportunity to meet with Rt Hon. Baroness Patricia Scotland, KC, former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Secretariat.
In our conversation, I have learned that Baroness Scotland’s leadership approach was particularly innovative and effective, especially three non-negotiable strategies for twenty-first-century multilateralism: build coalitions, seek prevention rather than mere reaction, and put new technology to work for the common good.
On building coalition for collaboration, she shared the example how she coordinated the signing of the Apia Commonwealth Ocean Declaration. Pulling together 49 coastal states, land-locked African members, green NGOs and the world’s second-largest shipping registry (Palau), Baroness Scotland secured the Commonwealth’s first-ever ocean treaty text, complete with 30 × 30 conservation goals and a guarantee that rising seas will not wash away maritime boundaries. The achievement was possible only because she had already nurtured ten country-led Blue Charter “action groups”, so the technical arguments were owned by ministers themselves before leaders arrived in Samoa.
That same owner-driven formula underpins the Connectivity Agenda. Instead of issuing top-down prescriptions, Scotland persuaded trade officials from five regional clusters—digital, physical, regulatory, supply-side and B2B—to write each other’s policy toolkits. The prize they chase together is a US $2 trillion intra-Commonwealth trade target by 2030.
Even inside the Secretariat she practised “co-create first, announce later”. The virtual Commonwealth Pro Bono Centre was co-designed by 14 least-developed members and six global law firms; on launch day Malawi’s Attorney-General called it “an invaluable resource that levels the negotiating table”.
Her focus on prevention rather than reaction was marked by her developing the flagship Climate Finance Access Hub. By embedding advisers directly inside ministries, the Hub helped small states raise US $384 million with another half-billion in the pipeline—money aimed at cyclone-resilient roads, mangrove buffers and drought-proof farms before the next cataclysm hits.
Prevention also animated Commonwealth Says NO MORE, the first pan-Commonwealth platform against gender-based violence. Instead of crisis hot-lines alone, the campaign arms local leaders with by-stander training, economic-cost calculators and a referral app designed to stop violence upstream.
Dedicated to the common good, Baroness Patricia developed a project aimed at “Strengthening the Adaptive Capacity of Coastal Communities of Fiji to Climate Change through Nature-Based Seawalls”. Traditionally, coastal-defence proposals from small islands can take 4 years to assemble and 2 years to approve. However, under the coordination of Baroness Scotland, this project took barely one year. Indeed, with the assistance of AI and scenario simulations, providing evidence pack, Fiji filed a full grant request to the Adaptation Fund in October 2023; by 19 April 2024 the Board had approved US $5.7 million for construction. The project will build the 4 km hybrid seawall, restore adjoining mangrove belts and train local youth as shoreline-monitoring rangers.
The Fiji seawall development process is a living case study of her preventative, tech-forward, common-good centred approach to multilateral governance.
Baroness Patricia Scotland steps down as Commonwealth Secretary-General on 31 March 2025; Ghana’s Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey takes over on 1 April 2025.
