What does intergenerational leadership make possible?

Imagined through the eyes of young people, the future carries many associations. Anything from a scary, uncertain life to a future full of opportunity, interest and breakthrough. These realities hold anticipation, frustration, and perhaps most crucially, an authentic desire to proactively shape the change that's coming.

That desire was the starting point for the Global Intergenerational Exchange, hosted in August 2026, that brought together fifteen young leaders from three organisations and thirteen countries. The question energising the dialogue was simple to ask but difficult to answer: what does intergenerational leadership make possible, and what does it look like in practice?

Why this matters, and why now

Many of the defining challenges of the next several decades, from climate adaptation and technological disruption, to the slow erosion of institutional trust, are being negotiated today by people who will not live to see their full consequences, while those who live with them are rarely in the room. This is not merely a generational grievance, but a critical design flaw: the institutions that shape our future were not built to include the people who bear the long-term costs of their decisions.

The exchange aimed to respond directly to that flaw. It brought together three leading organisations: Foundations for Tomorrow, Teach the Future and UNICEF Innocenti. All are working in different countries and institutional contexts, but they converge on the same conviction now endorsed at the highest level. In 2024, UN Member States adopted the Declaration on Future Generations, a commitment to safeguard the interests of those who will inherit today's decisions. Yet institutions are still rarely set up to prioritise the long-term wellbeing of children, young people and future generations.

Each organisation is addressing that gap through a different angle. Foundations for Tomorrow's Future Generations Fellowship embeds emerging Australian leaders in national policy and civic processes, building the pipeline that makes intergenerational leadership possible. Teach the Future's FutureWISE programme equips young people across the world with futures literacy skills, tools, and systems thinking to shape the world they are inheriting. UNICEF Innocenti's Youth Foresight Fellowship develops young leaders in strategic foresight as a tool for policy and systems change across global contexts. What connects the three is a shared awareness that intergenerational collaboration is a necessary precondition for addressing long-term challenges.

What made this room distinctive was its breadth stacked on top of its age range. Participants spanned thirteen countries, multiple languages, disciplines from law and medicine to bioinformatics and the arts, and institutional vantage points ranging from grassroots youth movements to work residing inside national governments and the multilateral system. Rather than a panel or a scripted program, the exchange gave participants open space to talk with one another and see what that breadth could produce. This piece is an account of the outputs of the Global Intergenerational Exchange.

What do we mean by 'intergenerational leadership'?

There is no one-size-fits-all model for intergenerational leadership. It looks different depending on your vantage point. Examples participants shared included a food bank staffed by volunteers aged 7 to 70, the First Nations Australian principle of Caring for Country designed to preserve ecological balance across deep time, and high school teachers partnering with community elders to redesign local education. These movements are connected by a shared refusal to allow age to be the organising principle of who gets to contribute.

Participants kept returning to one distinction: that intergenerational leadership is not the same as interdisciplinary collaboration, but it also cannot work without it. This distinction highlights that bridging generations is about more than just closing an age gap. It means unifying different experiences, disciplines, and forms of expertise around a shared objective.

The participants also pushed back on what might be called 'the handover myth': the assumption that leadership passes in one direction, from younger people waiting for older people to eventually make space. What surfaced instead was a suggestion for backward-facing continuity alongside forward-facing foresight. That is, honouring the people and decisions that came before, treating empathy and tolerance across generations as a prerequisite for the conversation to work. The handover myth is comfortable because it asks nothing of anyone until an unspecified future point. What this room modelled was the harder, more immediate alternative: shared authorship, starting now rather than at some later handover.

Its value in challenging assumptions and promoting empathy

Put people from different ages, cultures, and disciplines in a room together, and the ingrained assumptions get challenged faster than they would in a room of peers. For example, one FFT Fellow challenged the framing of colonisation as a historical event, arguing that in contexts such as Australia it remains a live force shaping decision-making today. Another participant challenged the assumption that only adults are equipped to think seriously about the future. The room included several participants under 18, whose contributions across 90 minutes made a strong case that leadership is not a function of age.

This is where the value of the exchange lies, and it extends well beyond a single conversation: having assumptions challenged is how empathy gets built across generational and cultural lines. That empathy functions as a safeguard against exclusionary policymaking, and it strengthens a compact between generations that most institutions currently assume rather than actively maintain.

Moving from dialogue to action

None of this matters, however, if it stays in the room, only between participants. The harder question raised in the exchange was where does the responsibility for change actually lie? It was clear that it cannot keep defaulting to young people, who have to keep asking for a seat at a table within a system that was never designed to include them.

Intergenerational leadership is more than a simple framework adopted at conferences or annual events. It is a way of consistently operating that has to show up in the rooms where trade-offs get decided, and policy actually gets made. Places such as boardrooms, parliaments, and councils are spaces that require something more specific than goodwill. Intergenerational leadership requires power sharing in the literal sense. It means inviting young leaders to take on existing seats of power and influence and making room for the full diversity of ages, cultures and experiences that long-term decisions actually depend on.

The biggest takeaway from this exchange for policymakers is that the people who will live longest with the consequences of today's decisions are still, disproportionately, absent from making them. This deserves a fix, not just a moral footnote.

The exchange itself offered a small glimpse of what that fix could look like. Three organisations, working across three continents through a single 90-minute call, showed what becomes possible when a room is designed to include people across generations. The next test is whether the handover myth can be retired in the rooms where the decisions with real consequences are made.