YouthxYouth | Transforming Education

How YouthxYouth Began

Zineb and Valentina
YouthxYouth Cofounders

YouthxYouth began in June 2020, when every education system in the world was making unprecedented changes as the most marginalized youth continued to fall further into crisis. Yet these national and global conversations were repeating the same critical error as the decades of conversations that came before it. They were excluding the core of their systems, the primary constituents that they were seeking to engage and serve: young people.

So our co-founders invited young people around the world to see this crisis as an opportunity to radically reimagine learning for themselves and their communities. In January of 2021, we hosted our first online Learning Festival, which gathered nearly 1000 young people and adult allies from over 80 countries around a central question: What if young people designed the future of education?

Since then, we have grown into a global youth-led, adult-supported learning community dedicated to transforming education for collective liberation. Through conscious activism, radical reimagination and intergenerational collaboration, we seek to co-create a world where learning serves everyone—us, our communities, and the planet.

Meet our community

Our global community of youth activists and adult allies are dedicated to accelerating the process of young people influencing, designing, and transforming their learning experiences and education systems.

Since our founding, we have engaged over 2000 youth activists from 80 countries across 6 continents. Through our programs, we build the capacity and confidence of youth to reclaim their learning and create life-affirming futures within their communities. We are led by and serve youth who are between the ages of 15 to 26—75% of whom live in the Global South, and about 50% live in Africa.

Our Weavership fellowship program has equipped nearly 100 young leaders in the art of weaving local and global communities in service of education transformation. Alongside experienced weavers from the Weaving Lab and youth-serving organizations around the globe, they learn and practice how to interconnect people, places and projects to create thriving learning ecosystems.

Our Global Action Circles accelerate intergenerational collaboration and youth-led projects across critical themes in education, including: youth mental health, climate & nature education, peace education, gender equity and more. Since launching in 2021, these Circles have led to the creation and evolution of almost 200 youth-led and intergenerational projects.

We have 9 Glocal Hubs across Africa, where our youth weavers are mobilizing local youth, community organizations, institutions and government to collectively address local challenges with the support of global knowledge, resources and networks. These locally-rooted, globally-supported homes for youth-led transformation of education are currently growing across six countries: Nigeria (Lagos, Ogun), South Africa (Cape Town), Uganda (Kampala, Nakivale, and Namutumba), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam), Cameroon (Yaounde), and Kenya (Mbita).

Our partners are an integral part of our community, learning and serving alongside us to co-create pathways for intergenerational collaboration and global solidarity. Through our annual Learning Festival and programs throughout the year, we work with a diverse ecosystem of over 60 youth-serving organizations:

Meet our core team

YouthxYouth is woven by a global Core Team, consisting of 6 youth activists (age 17-25), primarily from the Global South.

Erioluwa Adeyinka

He / Him

Executive Director/ Co-Founder

erioluwa@youthxyouth.com

Mohini Govender

She / They

Knowledge Gardener

mohini@youthxyouth.com

Meet our Wisdom Council

The YxY Wisdom Council is made up of 12 adult allies, including our co-founders Zineb Mouhyi and Valentina Raman. This Council collaborates with our Core Team to make strategic decisions, develop internal capacity, and expand our networks in support of YxY's work.

Dominic Regester

Director, Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation | Director Education, Salzburg Global Seminar

Dr. Karambu Ringera

Founder, Tiriji Foundation | Founder, New (NOW) Generation Leadership Program | Founder and President, International Peace Initiatives

Irmin Durand

Impact strategy | Communication | Relationship & community building

Valentina Raman

Co-Founder, YouthxYouth | Co-founder, The Weaving Lab

Zineb Mouhyi

Co-Founder, YouthxYouth | Co-founder, The Weaving Lab

Why Is This Work Important?

We connect the many injustices and crises we face today to one system that continuously seems to fail us: the dominant industrial education system. Born out of colonial ways of knowing and seeing the world, these factory-like ways of learning foster a monocultural society. The narrative that has and continues to be promoted through our industrial education system is one in which we are separate from ourselves, each other, our more-than-human family and the planet.

This has resulted in many intersecting struggles: in how we relate to our human family (institutionalized injustice), in how we relate to Earth and our relatives who aren’t human (the climate crisis) and in our mental and spiritual wellbeing (seen prominently in young people as a crisis in mental health), and so on. We see these as intersecting, unified by the Story of Separation, and recognize the education system to be a key place of opportunity and transformation.

Our Solution And Our Approach

Our solution is community. By building communities of care, online and in-person, young people start to see that they are not alone in questioning their education systems. They gain the confidence to ask deeper questions, and create innovative and thoughtful projects that they grow locally, while staying connected globally.
We build community through our youth-led programs, which build capacity through a tried and tested pedagogical approach which has 3 steps:
‍‍
What is: Sensemaking
What if: Radical Reimagination
What now: Personal & Collective Action
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This pedagogy is central to all our programs, which are designed and facilitated by our youth hosts and global partners. Our programs provide aspiring and experienced education activists of all ages with the community, resources, and global solidarity they need to grow, thrive, and co-create their visions for a better world.

An Invitation

We invite you to sit with what you’ve read and seen above. If you feel resonance with our community, our approach, and how we view the worlds we live in and the futures we are co-creating, we invite you to enter into community with us. We would love to get to know you and uncover the ways in which our work can best serve one another.

Join our community now. Let's weave the worlds of our deepest longings together.

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YouthxYouth: Education Activists