Making Radical Hope Possible — Belonging, Connection, Agency and Co-Creation

Photo by british actions on Unsplash

Every International Youth Day, you will see social media posts or hear people talk about youth engagement that point to one, two, or all three themes: “Young people are our future;” “We must empower youth;” “We need to give young people a voice.”

I must confess that I am also guilty of overusing these phrases as tokenistic sound bites. However, after more than two decades of both formal and informal youth engagement, I am uneasy when I hear or see these terms being used. Each one is an indirect label we place on young people: waiting for tomorrow because they are not ready today; waiting for permission to access power; and waiting for a microphone that someone else inevitably controls.

right here right now

The fact of the matter is that young people already have voice and agency. They are not our future. They are here right now; they have knowledge, creativity and capacities and boy do they have a voice. As a father of an 11-year-old who is invested in being included in all family decisions, I know!!!

The responsibility therefore is to recognise this and to remove the barriers that prevent those capacities from shaping decisions and systems. And so, the question I return to is not how we empower young people or give them voice. It is “What conditions are we creating around them that allow agency, belonging and hope to take root, in a world giving them plenty of reasons to lose all three?”

But this has not been something that I came to overnight. It has taken years to understand.

Journey

Working in the humanitarian sector taught me early that people closest to a crisis understand it better than those of us designing responses from a distance, if only we listened to them more. Working with the Red Cross Red Crescent Volunteers over the last 9 years further reinforced this. Given trust and room, people do not wait to be helped; they self-organise, contribute, lead. Young people are no exception. During COVID-19 and other countless disasters, I have watched them respond to shocks and crises not as beneficiaries but as first responders, while adults were still meeting to design a “response framework.” Through initiatives like the Global Youth Mobilization, I have had the distinct pleasure of having a front-row seat to thousands of locally rooted solutions designed by young people to address local problems because, simply put, the adults were not doing it. Forget “young people are the leaders of change tomorrow”; they were and are already leading it.

Credit to some organisations and people: this effort of young people has been recognised, and this was acknowledged by putting young people on panels, inviting them to speak at international conferences, forming youth councils, and creating youth advisors. Somehow in this process, we forgot about the heterogeneity of young people and expected these measures to address the youth voice, without recognising that there is no single “youth” (geography, gender, disability, and identity) manifestation whose single voice reaches our institutions (after all, we don’t expect one adult to represent all the adults!!). All whilst adults quietly kept the budgets and made the final decisions. This, of course, raises further, harder questions about who designed the table, who controls the resources, and who decides what happens after?

There’s also a deeper problem sitting underneath all of this, and I think we rarely name it: we talk about “young people” and “the people and institutions working with them” as though these were two separate populations. One that needs engaging, and one that does the engaging. Once that separation exists, something predictable happens. Youth becomes a technical area; a portfolio; a sector; a desk; a unit; a line in a strategy document; something you have a “youth policy” for, the same way you might have a procurement policy or a communications policy. With this classification, technical areas get treated technically: you build a programme, appoint a focal point, run a consultation, report the numbers, move on. The trouble is that resources, power and access get maintained very differently once young people sit inside a silo rather than inside the institution itself. Silos are easy to fund and hard to empower. For example, you can throw a grant at a “youth programme” without ever having to share a board seat, a budget line, or a real decision with the young people it’s meant to serve. The silo lets an institution look engaged while changing almost nothing about who actually holds power inside it.

I realised that participation does not necessarily equate to power, and consultation does not automatically mean agency. I would go further. We often discuss youth empowerment, a term I’ve previously used positively, without understanding who the “we” refers to, who holds the power, and who awaits its transfer. This language inadvertently suggests adults and institutions are the ones with power, while young people are passive recipients, granted agency only when “we” believe they are ready. This does not acknowledge that young people are not powerless; they already have the capacity to create, organise, question, care, resist, imagine, and lead. The real issue therefore isn’t a lack of power within youth, but the systems around them that decide whether their agency is recognised, supported, and allowed to make an impact.

I don’t think the answer then is a better youth strategy. I think it’s dissolving the category itself back into something wider: community. Young people are not a stakeholder group sitting outside our institutions, waiting to be consulted. They are already inside our families, our congregations, our workplaces, our neighbourhoods and our movements, as members, not as a technical area we manage. That’s the shift I’d actually argue for: not better ways of working on youth, but recognising that no one should be working on youth at all. Youth are part of the wider community and ecosystem in which we all sit, which means the engagement has to be systemic, not sectoral. It’s not a youth desk feeding into the institution, but the institution itself, understood as something young people already co-own. The moment we treat them as fully part of the community rather than a silo within it, questions about resources, power and access stop being “youth engagement” questions and become the questions every part of a community has to answer about itself.

Conditions

So, I stopped thinking about youth empowerment or obsessing about whether our task is to empower young people and started thinking about the conditions surrounding youth agency. We must recognise agency, share power, remove barriers, provide direct access to resources and create the conditions in which young people can shape the decisions affecting their lives. This is a very different proposition that shifts the narrative from giving power to sharing power, from invitation to co-creation, from voice to influence, and from asking how we can change young people to asking how the systems surrounding them might need to change.

Agency cannot exist in isolation. There needs to be something you are part of to have agency to make decisions about. This shift in narrative takes us to the concept of belonging. My work in peacebuilding repeatedly reminds us that durable change is relational; it depends on trust, on community, on knowing you have a place. Therefore, what needs to be explored is belonging: knowing you matter, that you have relationships you can rely on, that you feel safe, and that you can shape the institutions you’re part of. At a time of great societal disruptions, belonging is a real challenge. What we need now is a new contract of belonging and connection, not written on paper, but forged in how we engage with each other. This also must conceptualise a different understanding of what generations owe each other. The goal isn’t for adults to step aside so young people can lead, nor for young people to simply wait their turn. It’s a genuine intergenerational partnership where experience meets imagination; where adults are accompanying rather than controlling and where young people are questioning inherited systems while still drawing on the knowledge of those who built them. It is a nice tripartite relationship. Young people bring imagination institutions often struggle to see; older generations bring memory and hard-earned wisdom; institutions bring resources and the ability to turn ideas into structural change.

The question, therefore, isn’t which generation should lead. It is how we travel together into a future none of us has a complete map for. It requires a rethink of a journey that demands that elders be willing to share power, that young people be given room to question inherited assumptions, and that both sides be humble enough to learn from the other: not handing young people responsibility for fixing what they didn’t break but developing shared stewardship of what comes next. No single generation can build a future it cannot yet fully describe alone.

Reframing the narrative

We need to shift the narrative from ‘gatekeepers’ to ‘accompaniers’; and from ‘deciding and participating’ to ‘co-creating’. We often invite young people into a process after the important questions have already been decided, and we ask them what they think of a strategy, a programme and a campaign that adults have largely designed already. That is participation, and it is no longer valid!

Co-creation starts earlier. It asks young people to help define the problem, question our assumptions, imagine possibilities, design responses, make decisions and learn from what happens next. This matters because young people do not simply bring “youth perspectives.” They bring knowledge and experience of institutions, technology, education, work, community, and planetary uncertainty that are different from adults'. Those lived experiences are forms of expertise that can reveal things established systems cannot see on their own. This is why I’d retire “a seat at the table.” The current poly crisis isn’t a dinner party young people arrived late to. They were handed that table and asked to eat the scraps from it.

Within that co-creation space, I believe that there are five roles that young people occupy: Agents who turn concern into action, Architects who help design the futures they’ll inhabit, Advocates who challenge injustice, Anchors who strengthen community, and Amplifiers who make sure the young people closest to power aren’t the only ones heard. These aren’t a checklist; they’re expressions of belonging within relationship. Agency without connection is exhausting; advocacy without belonging is alienating; being asked to design something without power to see that through is tokenism.

And power is something we also need to be honest about. If young people can generate ideas but cannot influence decisions, access resources, or challenge the assumptions underlying a project, then I think we should be careful about calling that process co-creation. Co-creation is not asking young people to help us build our solution. It is being willing to discover together that we may have been solving the wrong problem. It is not a workshop technique but the practice through which intergenerational partnership actually takes form.

Nowhere is this more visible than in how young people carry the climate crisis. Our reflex, when a young person feels anxious about a planet in visible decline, is to prescribe how we reduce their anxiety. Wellbeing matters, without question, but what if some of that anxiety is a rational response to the world around them, not a malfunction inside them? Picture being worried about the planet whilst also facing exam pressures, economic precarity, existential geopolitical threats, institutions you don’t trust, and adults telling you to simply “be more resilient as I was when I was your age.”

The problem isn’t only inside the young person. It’s in the ecosystem around them and the contract around them. A young person’s capacity to navigate uncertainty is shaped by several interlocking dimensions: their inner world (wellbeing, identity, tolerance for ambiguity; their relationships); their connection to nature; their civic agency (whether participation can actually move a decision); their experience of peace and trust in the institutions and communities around them; their cultural and spiritual resources for making meaning; and their economic security (a dimension we underestimate badly). Climate anxiety among young people therefore rarely travels alone; it sits alongside worry about jobs, affordability and whether a “just transition” has any place for them in it.

So we must reframe the question being asked from not how do we make young people more resilient to the anxiety caused by the climate crisis, but how do we strengthen the conditions so concern becomes belonging, connection, agency and hope? These dimensions aren’t separate boxes: Insecurity amplifies anxiety but belonging builds resilience; connection inspires stewardship, agency rebuilds trust and meaning sustains action when outcomes stay uncertain. This is a system, which means the response has to be systemic too.

In that spirit of co-creation, the systemic response should not be designed as a consultation exercise once the framework is built, but as a process of involvement from the start. You don’t design a set of dimensions for young people and then ask whether they like it. Young people should help co-create the framework itself: interrogate whether those dimensions reflect their lived reality, name what’s missing, map the systems producing their anxiety and their hope, and help identify where the leverage points are.

This all points to something powerful that we need to tap into if we want to get this right — Radical Hope. It is not only something we feel, nor is it optimism. Optimism assumes things will turn out fine. Radical hope, as Jonathan Lear described it, is harder. It is the capacity to stay committed to a good future even when we cannot yet fully picture its shape. That is perhaps what it means to be young today, asked to prepare for a future the adults around you can’t confidently describe either.

A different promise

Where does this leave us? We need to understand agency and the capacity to change. Co-creation is how that agency gets exercised with others. We need to build trust and belonging, which are the relational conditions that make it sustainable and inculcate interdependence. We need to foster radical hope, which is the courage to act meaningfully toward a future we cannot yet fully see, and which is practised together rather than assigned to one generation.

We also have to retire the three phrases we started with:

• We do not need to say young people are our future: They are our present, already leading, already carrying more than their share.
• We do not need to say we must empower youth: empowerment granted can be withdrawn just as easily; what lasts is power shared.
• We do not need to say we need to give young people a voice: they already have one. What they need is a generation willing to listen, then move together.

We share the responsibility of building the conditions in which radical hope stays possible. This means moving from consultation to co-creation; from voice to influence; from individual resilience to resilient ecosystems; from treating anxiety as a private malfunction to examining the systems producing it; and from telling young people to be hopeful to building the relationships, resources and openings through which radical hope can actually be practised.

We also need to agree on a different promise with young people: to build together the conditions in which they can exercise agency, experience belonging and practise radical hope.

This is not about offering young people a seat at a table someone else has designed. It is about drawing the map together of an ecosystem in which young people can understand the world, feel connected to it, act upon it and know that they belong, while having the agency to help shape where we go next. Because when the old maps no longer work, our task is not to hand young people a new one. It is to draw the next one together.

Not someday. Now.