What makes a Global Youth Council Fellow?

Lessons from admissions so far

Felicitas Irazusta . Global Youth Leadership . Community & Connection

It’s admissions season, and what’s showing up in these conversations is already teaching us something about who the next generation of global leaders actually is. We’re in the middle of building the founding cohort of the Global Youth Council, and I wanted to share some of what we’re seeing. Not just because it’s remarkable, but because I think it says something about what we actually mean when we say someone is a good fit for this Fellowship.

We’re still in the middle of reviewing applications and meeting candidates, from countries spanning every populated continent: Nigeria, India, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, France, Lithuania, Indonesia, Colombia and beyond.

When we built our selection process, we said we look at every candidate through five lenses: Leadership, Vision, Social Commitment, Talent or Skills, and Communication. Reading through these applications, the same few patterns keep showing up inside those five words. If you recognise yourself in any of them, that’s exactly the point of this piece.

You don't wait for
a title to lead

What keeps catching me off guard is how many applicants already hold an actual leadership office. Not a club title, but a seat with real responsibility attached to it: student council chairs representing tens of thousands of peers, sworn-in local councillors still in secondary school, elected school presidents who’ve turned that platform into funded projects for their own communities. These aren’t hypothetical leadership ambitions; they’re already in the room, making decisions that affect other people. If you’ve stepped into responsibility before anyone handed you the title for it, at school or in your community, that instinct is exactly what we mean by Leadership.

You build the thing instead of just proposing it

Alongside that, we keep seeing applicants who have already founded or co-founded something real: a company, an NGO, a media outlet, a mental health platform. Not “wants to someday.” Already has. That’s Vision, as we think about it here. Not a five-year plan written for an application form, but the willingness to try something before you feel ready, and to keep going once it’s harder than you expected.

You’ve already learned to make your voice heard

Debate keeps showing up as close to a common thread across every country we’ve heard from. Young people using structured argument to find their voice, whatever language they’re arguing in. Some of the strongest applications aren’t the most polished; they’re the ones where you can tell the person has practiced saying a hard thing clearly, and has learned to listen to someone who disagrees with them. That’s Communication, and it matters to us as much as any achievement on a page.

You solve the problem that’s actually in front of you, not the one you were assigned

Youth mental health, in particular, keeps coming up as something applicants are building solutions for themselves. Peer-support platforms, public advocacy in front of local decision-makers. Not because we asked them to, but because it’s the problem in front of them. Nobody assigned them a project on girls’ education, civic participation, or youth mental health. They picked those problems themselves, in their own communities, because they were the ones who saw it first. That’s Social Commitment: not a cause chosen for a college essay, but one chosen because it was already theirs.

What this is teaching me

Our materials have always said we’re looking for “starters, not talkers”: people who don’t just have ideas but put them into motion. I’ve read that line dozens of times while helping write it. Reading it in an application is different. It’s one thing to say you value initiative; it’s another to keep opening folders and finding teenagers who have already built working, functioning responses to the problem in front of them (a business, a support network, a document hundreds of others suddenly have access to) without waiting for anyone’s permission to start.We still have interviews to close out before this cohort is final. But already, I think we’re seeing exactly what the Global Youth Council was built to find: young people who don’t wait for permission to start changing the world around them, wherever in the world they happen to be.I can’t wait to meet the rest of them.If this sounds like you, or like someone you know, we hope we get the chance to learn your story too.We can’t wait to keep being surprised by the stories behind the Global Youth Council.