Last June, 17-year old Isaya Yunge from Tanzania became the first young African to meet face-to-face with G8 leaders as part of the UNICEF-supported Junior 8 (J8) Summit. The idea that young people needed to speak out on global issues at the highest level was first realized as the Group of Eight (G8) world leaders met at Gleneagles in 2005, and UNICEF convened a group of young people to meet in the C8 Children’s Forum. As G8 leaders followed up on Gleneagles commitments in St. Petersburg a year later, young representatives from the J8 Summit, now an annual UNICEF-supported event, discussed G8 issues directly with their respective heads of state. By 2007, young people’s participation at the G8 had increased the J8 Summit’s profile and young representatives met as a group with G8 leaders in Germany to make recommendations about issues including climate change, poverty and HIV/AIDS.

This year, the Junior 8 Summit participants plan to again meet world leaders face-to-face in Japan, strengthening a platform from which young people speak directly to some of the world’s most powerful political decision-makers. J8 participation has set a global precedent for young people, but what comes next? How do we harness J8 momentum to move young people from event-based participation to larger continuous and connected communities? Put simply, youth participation needs to move from a focus on one-time events into a more meaningful community, one that connects participants with a wider youth audience based on themes that are the actual substance of the event itself – for J8 participants, the topics on the G8 agenda, including climate change, global health, and poverty and development.

By its very nature, event-based youth participation like the J8 Summit limits what it sets out to create. A physical event is attended only by selected participants: no matter what the budget or scope, a majority of young people simply cannot attend. Likewise, events’ time-bound nature confines input from young people to a handful of days, and as the agenda’s content recedes into memory, maintaining momentum becomes difficult. With the J8 Summit becoming more and more a cornerstone of high-level youth participation, it makes sense to move event-based participation towards a platform that replaces the constraints of face-to-face participation with a wider definition of youth dialogue and activism.

Three online platforms currently support young people participating in the J8: a public J8 Website, and internal Workspace and UNICEF’s existing Voices of Youth community. Both the Website and the Workspace link to a discussion forum on Voices of Youth, connecting young people who want to have their say on J8 issues to an active and supported online community. In addition, a video platform on both the Website and the Workspace will show the J8 competition entries, videos from participants, and encourage young people from around the world to send a message to G8 leaders. This then points to a larger challenge: how do we innovate new approaches to youth participation that connect young people in the most meaningful and accessible way?

Young people are a powerful force for change and our most valuable resource for the future, and must be approached as partners in development with their own areas of interest and expertise. Channeling J8 event participants into thematic communities based on G8 themes allows them to focus on the knowledge sets they’re interested in. Using an online platform to do this further enables them to connect with other like-minded young people also active in their countries and communities. Using a Wiki-based platform encourages them to create and control information around what interests them, but the connections don’t stop there. Directing event participants towards larger thematic platforms enables a wider audience of young people to have their say and reach out in turn to other young people in their own networks. For example, returning from Junior 8 Summit, young people already give presentations in their school and communities. Connecting these young people on an online platform will harness the motivation of their peers to participate around the issues that interest and affect them, moving the outcomes of event-based participation towards online thematic communities to convene dialogue around real issues of interest.

Even more meaningfully, thematic participation on online platforms allows connections to be made with partner youth organizations, NGOs and communities all over the world. For example, the J8 community can be connected with youth activists engaged in fighting climate change, improving global health, or learning more about how the cycle of poverty affects development. For the Junior 8, this means that not only are participants supported in continuing their advocacy and activism in a meaningful way, but that a wider audience of young people can add their online voices to those of the physical participants. Ultimately, using online platforms, there will be little difference between Junior 8 event participants and participants online: young people will have a platform on which they can communicate no matter their location. Using the Internet as a space to convene youth dialogue around thematic issues builds a movement of young people’s participation in the widest sense.