World Youth Skills Day

Today is World Youth Skills Day, a day designated by the UN to “celebrate the strategic importance of equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship.” To find out more about both the challenges and opportunities facing young people today, we talked to Officine Italia, an association of young professionals with the goal of making Italy a more forward-looking and inclusive country, and Nadia Paleari, Global Events & Partnerships Project Officer at the SDNS Youth.?

Regenerative Society Foundation: What are the main challenges that young people around the world face today??

Nadia Paleari: In my opinion, the main challenge is to achieve meaningful engagement and empowerment. Most of the time young people are involved but not really listened to: we need to revert this mindset and build an ecosystem in which all stakeholders (including young people) can contribute to shaping solutions for our future.

Officine Italia: We genuinely believe that the main challenge young people face is being seen, heard and given concrete opportunities to take action and have an impact. Young people all over the world and from any background, are eager to help and to propose innovative solutions to the most pressing issues, from climate change to rising inequality. The era of the “one-man show” seems to be gone and we need collective action to solve today’s challenges. It seems like young people are much more aware of this paradigm shift than the current political class. Therefore, providing the right toolkit and possibilities to connect, as well as being open to embrace young people's perspective, is key to overcome the current polarization and develop a comprehensive action plan to build a more equal and sustainable world.?

Regenerative Society Foundation: What can we learn from young people about how to face the challenges affecting the world today? Such as climate change, inequality, or education.?

Officine Italia: As Officine Italia, our main effort is to project and share ideas between youth, institutions, businesses, nonprofits and build from there. Young people bring longer term visions, unconventional perspectives and new energy — and that has to be capitalized upon and also re-learned at any age and with every generation.

Another learning opportunity we see is that of a truly integrated and consequential approach to challenging issues, such as climate change, which are ever-changing and require immediate and continuously evolving responses. The "old", siloed approach didn't work and won't work in the future, as the challenges we face become more and more pressing.

Nadia Paleari: I believe young people deeply understand the pivotal role of interconnections: our actions have consequences, on other people and the environment. This makes us more conscious and responsible in our choices. For these reasons, we have a more rooted sense of community and are generally more inclined to act for "a greater good", a cause or a value we believe in. That is what changes our mindset when it comes to the challenges of our time: we act so that no one is left behind, and in order to achieve not only growth (i.e. economic growth), but rather widespread prosperity.

Regenerative Society Foundation: How can we equip young people for the future??

Nadia Paleari: We are determined in our goal to fight the challenges of our times, but we are also the least "equipped" to do so: most young people lack the educational, financial and/or material resources to start working on sustainable development. We have ideas, but we do not have the opportunities to carry them out. Young people should thus be equipped first with the educational tools, and then with the resources to turn their ideas into action.

Officine Italia: As basic as it may seem, culture, education and training are the only real transformative tools we see to create a systemic change. These need to be paired with opportunities for responsibility, accountability, and putting skills into practice. Without a far-sighted and bold approach to the upbringing of future generations, no investment or policy will be enough.

Regenerative Society Foundation: What actions can businesses take to empower young people??

Officine Italia: The list of opportunities for action here is incredibly long. Businesses have become prominent “public” actors in the last decades, in the sense that they are increasingly held accountable and responsible for the impact they have on the public sphere, and this is even more so for younger generations.Out of that long list of actions we'd point out two that we're working on.?

First, the choices businesses make play a key role in the life of employees, suppliers and clients, and in their activation towards a cause, be it climate change broadly or air pollution in a neighborhood. Serious time should be spent on considering these choices and young people should always be a key part of the decision process, not ancillary nor optional.

In the same fashion a second, clear action is to give responsibility and accountability to young people: make sure you have board members, C-level staffers, and managers that are at least under 35 and invest in their growth.

Nadia Paleari: Promote co-creation processes that involve young people in order to shape solutions for the green transition: hackathons, calls for ideation, hybrid job offers. Young people provide a new kind of resource in the workforce: this means that businesses need to embrace change and progress and become more open-minded to experiment new opportunities. This is the way to create solutions for new challenges and start making business with an innovative approach.?