At Learning Planet Institute we know that evolution is not just normal, it’s essential!
We also recognise that staying in touch with our origins and previous generations yields valuable lessons. This is why, for our 2024/2025 edition of the Youth Design Challenge, we’re innovating in many very ways, yet sticking to the core themes that guide our work, and continuing to put youth in the driving seat. Also, like last year, finalists and winners will be celebrated at the 2025 LearningPlanet Festival.
We prototyped the Youth Design Challenge last year and are expanding and improving the 2024/2025 edition to enable even more global youth (aged 15-26) to pitch their ideas on these themes that echoes our Festival theme of ‘Learning to take care of ourselves, each other, and the planet’:
- Engagement: community engagement, inclusion and social justice
- Flourishing: well-being, thriving and socio-emotional development
- Sustainability: planetary health and regenerative economy
In calling for youth to submit their ideas and to design the future of learning we saw how strongly these themes resonate with them.
Engagement brought a wealth of proposals including addressing the art of arguing and having difficult conversations with cooperative mindsets, and our winner, Pearl Perumal, with her idea to interweave global indigenous knowledge systems, unlocking and protecting learnings across generations and cultures.
The need to promote well-being and self development (all core aspects of our Ikigai and Inner Development Goals work) was captured in ideas ranging from ensuring students started each day with a nutritious meal through to including mental health in physical recovery and rehabilitation programmes. Human Flourishing needs to be at the core of future learning programmes and so remains a theme of our Challenge.
Whilst no one needs convincing that Sustainability is key; we need more keys to unlock the potential learning has to empower us to act and react to protect our planet and our economy. Our judging panel, from from leading universities, student organisations and global NGOs, were bowled over by the unique, inspired and practical upskilling ideas the Challenge yielded, including another winner, Georgina Odero, who proposed a ‘Sustainable Engineering’ knowledge-sharing platform and programme to enable learning to repair used machines in African countries.
Another key indicator that our themes touch and inspire youth was the range of countries we received applications from. Ideas poured in from Singapore, Peru, Kenya, The Philippines – 30 countries in all – demonstrating both the global desire and need for evolutions in learning felt by youth. This is why, whilst many aspects of our 2024/2025 Youth Design Challenge are evolving, our core themes remain constant, and we can’t wait to see that this year’s competition brings!
To find out more check out our dedicated page here, and get inspired by last years winners here.
