UNSCRIPTED: uNGA 2025
PROJECT: UNSCRIPTED: UNGA 2025
PARTNERS: United Nations Youth Office
The Brief
Creating meaningful spaces for intergenerational dialogue is essential to building trust, strengthening social cohesion and shaping solutions that reflect both lived experience and long-term vision. When young people and decision-makers engage as equals, dialogue moves beyond consultation toward shared understanding, co-creation and action.
The Approach
INSPIRATION
Despite significant momentum behind the youth agenda, young people are still too often relegated to the sidelines of major global summits – selected from a narrow pool of media-trained advocates for highly curated moments, rather than engaged in all of their diversity.
The Education Team at Project Everyone and the United Nations Youth Office identified an opportunity to change that with Unscripted: a new event series designed to refresh the intergenerational event format and foster more authentic encounters by bringing together an intimate and diverse group of local and international young people to share, connect, and explore the issues that matter to them, guided by “Connectors” (senior leaders from business, philanthropy and policy).
By design, Unscripted is powerful not prescriptive; participatory not curated; and driven by youth insight. With the support of SAP, the event was successfully piloted at Goals House during UN General Assembly week (New York; September 2025) and at the Misk Global Forum (Riyadh; November 2025), with the ambition to scale with new partners and to new spaces in 2026.
Thank you so much for inviting me to take part. I really enjoyed being part of such an inspiring and thoughtful conversation, and it was a privilege to connect with so many passionate young people and partners. The space felt genuinely collaborative and hopeful - a testament to the work your team put in to bring everyone together. Congratulations again on a powerful event.
The Results
TITLE AREA
- Unscripted provides a foundational format — one that enables leaders to experience genuine connection with young people and sets the groundwork for action.
- Young participants engage as genuine contributors, with their lived experiences directly shaping the direction of conversation. Connectors respond with curiosity, actively listening and engaging with ideas presented by youth participants.
- The event provides a practical counterpoint to a well-documented gap: while 92% of senior executives recognise that intergenerational collaboration strengthens leadership, only 11% of young leaders and 37% of senior leaders report it as widespread in practice.
- Unscripted directly challenges that reality. Senior leaders gain perspective from the cohort most affected by the decisions they make, with youth participants reframing problems and humanising policies in ways that are often overlooked.
- The result is a recalibration of the room: not youth speaking to leaders, but youth and leaders speaking with each other.