Around the world, young people are stepping into humanitarian action in ways that challenge long-standing assumptions about who leads, who responds, and how communities rebuild after crisis. From Haiti to Türkiye, from Sudan to Peru, youth have acted as first responders, community organisers, digital mobilisers, and key connectors in places where formal systems struggle to keep pace.Yet despite this growing evidence, “youth leadership” in humanitarian actionremainsinconsistently understood and weakly institutionalised. Across contexts, young people describe similar patterns: they volunteer, coordinate, innovate, and sustain community support, but rarely gain recognition asactors in their own right.Instead, they occupy fragmented roles with unclear pathways toward leadership or professional opportunities.

This leads to a central question for humanitarian actors: how can the sector move from ad-hoc youth engagement to genuine youth leadership? Join our panel of expert to unpack:

• What does youth leadership mean across different crisis contexts?
• What global patterns are emerging from recent research conducted by Open Space Works and HLA?
• How can organisations design safe, structured, and empowering pathways for youth leadership in humanitarian action?
• What can we learn from comparative experiences across regions?

This panel bring together experts from Open Space Works Ukraine (a women’s-led local research organisation based in Ukraine), a project lead for the Youth Internship pilot in Peru from the Humanitarian Leadership Academy, and a local partner and youth intern who both took part in the HLA’s Youth internship programme in Türkiye.

Speakers:

Jennifer Dias - Humanitarian Leadership Academy (a department in Save the Children UK with the mission to accelerate locally led action)

Maryana Zaviyska - Open Space Works Ukraine (a women’s-led local research organisation based in Ukraine)

Olha Shevchuk-Kliuzheva – Alliance UA CSO (An alliance of Ukrainian Civil Society Organizations focused on ensuring local leadership in responding to humanitarian crises)

Mercedes Garcia – Save the Children International

Youth Intern from the HLA’s Youth Internship Programme in Türkiye