Keep Dreaming Keep Fighting by Kurio

“To the young people, I say, you are a gift to your communities and indeed the world. You are our hope and our future.” – Wangari Maathai

Across the world, young people are coming of age amidst profound social, ecological, and political breakdown. They are organising within conditions and inheriting systems they did not create or design, and imagining futures that many of the systems around are not built to hold. And still, they powerfully, resiliently, and with immense courage organise, create, care for one another, and imagine otherwise.

In honor of International Youth Day, which was observed yesterday, we wanted to sit with that power a little more deeply and explore what it means to recognise youth power as something already alive and moving, what might young people need to exercise that power well, and what might it mean for all of us, across generations, to become better ancestors together.

Reflections on Becoming a Better Ancestor through Youth Power

by Mohini Govender
YouthxYouth, WE in the World

Wondrously and powerfully, nothing grows in soil that has not first received something from what came before it. I think ancestry, and thus our relationship to responsibility, works in much the same way through how we are all, in one way or another, standing on ground that others have tended, breathing air and inhabiting systems shaped by the choices, care, and struggles of those who came before us. What we have inherited (from both what nourishes us and what constrains us) is part of the soil from which we grow. I find solace in the way adrienne maree brown’s words from their book, Emergent Strategy, offer language for this: “we are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us.”

This is fundamentally what feels so central to this collective moment: that so much of what has been built was imagined by people who could not, or would not, imagine us. They could not imagine the ones now young, and they could not imagine the worlds their longing would eventually cost. In contrast, for me, to become a better ancestor centers on labouring a different imagination, rooted in facing patterns of harm that we can refuse to hand forward and, more importantly, patterns of care that we can insist on planting now so that they might be inherited and harvested from later.

This essay is an attempt to sit with that labour, and specifically with the ones who are doing it in some of the most urgent, most bodily ways: young people.

The ground we are standing on

We are living through convergent unmakings of systems, language, processes and fundamentally a reality. What this means is that this turbulence has become and will increasingly become the ordinary conditions for young people perpetually coming of age amidst it. And yet turbulence has always been the medium through which the most vital movements have been born. Collapse costs real things (safety, years, lives, etc.) and it is also true, as every organiser who has done this work knows in their bones, that the old order rarely makes room for the new until it is forced to.

This makes the question of youth power inseparable from the conditions in which young people are coming of age. To live so intimately within the unmaking of inherited systems means youth power, then, is already present in the capacity of young people to perceive what is breaking and to participate in the making of what comes next and does not merely begin at the point of “invitation”.

Read the August 2026 Joy & Justice Newsletter here.