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.
Global Humanity for Peace Institute, is delighted to invite 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.
What to expect:
Pre-programme online encounters to build connections
Five days in Rome of experiential, reflective, and co-creative learning
Post-programme support to help develop a real-world changemaking project
Certificate of Participation upon completion
Who should apply? Young people aged 19–27 who are passionate about contributing to a more peaceful and just world, open to diverse perspectives, and keen to deepen their changemaking practice.
Scholarships available: The programme covers accommodation, meals, local transport, and all in-programme activities. Participants are responsible for their own travel to Rome and medical insurance.
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.
