Introducing our Fifth annual Learning Festival

Our long-awaited beloved Learning Festival is coming up again for its now-fifth rotation, and we truly cannot wait to convene in community with you all and embark on this  learning journey together.

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This year's learning festival feels profoundly different in many ways, and one aspect that we believe is mutually felt across our ecosystems is how, after a deeply turbulent, violent and grief-stricken year, our questions have become deeper, more truthful and more urgent. 

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As an organisation born during the strife of the COVID-19 pandemic - a time when young people were drowning in systemic failures of those in power - the past year has reminded us why YouthxYouth exists. Our purpose remains clear and necessary: to accelerate the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their learning experiences and education systems. This felt irrefutably relevant in 2020 and it is still relevant to what young people are seeking today.

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Right now, we are being called to feel, heal, dream, and nurture the educational landscapes that our times demand amidst the crumbling systems that we've inherited. We recognise that the educational systems we have been born into are entangled with this paradigm of extraction, genocide, alienation, and separation. They have severed our connections from one another, from our more-than-human kin, and from our collective capacity for imagination, empathy, and regeneration. 

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This disconnect has created a generation of young people who must somehow reconcile their lived experiences of global trauma with educational systems that weren't designed to acknowledge, let alone address, such realities.The suffering is real. The pain is visceral. Death at unfathomable scales, systemic violence, and ecological collapse. And yet - and yet - We need to face this, to hold one another through this pain. We need to grow up, leaning into the selves we know are ready to show up to face this. And then, we need to be present, midwifing the worlds that represent the death of what we know and the birth of what we need, worlds that emerge from the compost of the old.

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In this space between worlds, we want to gather together as learners, dreamers, and midwives of transformation to shed the skins of education as we have known it: education as a mechanism of control, of standardisation, of flattening human potential into narrow corridors of productivity and compliance. Instead, we want to step into an understanding of learning as a sacred act of connection, remembering, weaving ourselves towards each other, to the living more-than-human world, and to our most expansive and liberated selves.

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We recognise that this past year has an unprecedented feeling, a required release of hopes, of beings who we thought might ‘save us’ and accordingly a jump (or fall) into the unknown. We stand at a crossroads with an invitation to stop trying to repair what is broken and instead imagine what has not yet been created. We have the gift of traditions rich with knowledge stretching back to our birth as a species, the wisdom and teachings of our kin who came before us and our ability to be active creators of worlds yet unseen, unheard, unimagined. We do not have to sit tight and wait like passive recipients of a predetermined future. We can love, educate, imagine and create right now.

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So, with this shared, we invite your vulnerability, uncertainty, and the courage to sit with discomfort. We invite rage, grief, hope, and tenderness. We invite you to our 5th annual Learning Festival where we are going to be exploring: “What kind of education might enable us to face the end of the world as we know it and, in its place, to build many worlds where all life belongs?”

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What is the YxY Learning Festival?

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The annual Learning Festival is a convergence of dedicated beings from all over the globe dedicated to learning, imagining, and weaving with one another in service of education transformation. This hybrid gathering, occurring every January around the International Day of Education in partnership with Learning Planet Institute, is a space committed to fostering a sense of belonging, learning, and co-action among all who engage both online and in-person in our Glocal Hubs. 

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Each year, the Festival focuses on one learning question that guides us through the 3-day learning journey from What Is to What If and culminating with What Now. We host multiple sessions from Activist Classrooms to Community Gardens and even an Open Mic!

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To get a sense of what the festival is like take a look at some session recordings from last year’s festival: 2024 Learning Festival: “How do we need to know, live, and weave together to create the world of our deepest longings?"

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What to expect?

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This year our festival is going to be running from approximately 2pm UTC - 7:30pm UTC on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of January! 

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Together across the 3-days, we will explore:

• Day 1: Facing Our Reality – What do we need to open our eyes to?
• Day 2: Growing Up – Who do we need to become?
• Day 3: Showing Up – How do we start or continue to show up in these times?

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And it’s going to be guided by three sessions a day:

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• HEAD: A provocation or reflection on the day’s theme and question. Intellectually stimulating us to reflect and ponder.

The Head component invites us to examine our assumptions, to pull apart what we think we know to develop a practice of deep curiosity that helps us see the patterns, understand the systems at play, and imagine what could be different. It offers the conditions for productive cognitive discord - that productive discomfort that signals we're pushing beyond our existing frameworks and mental models.

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• HEART: Exploring the day’s theme and provocation through a conversation or a creative exercise. In these sessions we explore the question of the day in an experiential way, and integrate our learnings into our hearts and emotional spaces beyond the intellect.

The Heart space is where we engage our emotional intelligence, our relationships, our grief, our joy, our full humanity, moving from intellectual understanding to embodied knowing. In this space we  see our individual healing and collective liberation as intertwined.

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• HANDS: Exploring the day’s theme through creative expression and output. Focusing on action and ‘what it is we can do’ to address the day’s theme and question.

The Hands component grounds our capacities and emotions in tangible action. This is where we experiment with putting our learning into practice, prototyping small interventions that have the potential to create change.

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Finally, you can already take a look at our full programme for the Learning Festival here!

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If this resonates with you, piques your curiosity, feels challenging (or maybe somewhere in between), we warmly welcome you to join us on this three day learning journey.

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Register Now!

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Mark your calendars, spread the word, and get ready to embark on this adventure with us!

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P.s. Our Unleash the Power within YOUth fundraising campaign is still going and as a youth-led, nonprofit organisation, your contribution directly supports our young people. If you can, please consider donating and sustaining our work throughout this year.

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Donate Now!