Three Years In: What ECOSOC Taught Me About Ripples, Narratives, and Listening

By Arissa Roy, 2026 Community Champion, Europe & North America Youth Representative, UNESCO SDG4 Youth & Student Network

We just brought humans home from space. And yet 273 million children and youth are out of school worldwide, a number that has climbed for the seventh consecutive year. More than 8 million children in Sudan, nearly half of those of school age, have gone roughly 484 days without setting foot in a classroom. In Gaza, families are buried under rubble while children learn in tents. In Ukraine, communities rebuild between air raids.

This is the world I walked into the ECOSOC Youth Forum carrying, and the world that shaped what I came to say.

What the ECOSOC Youth Forum is

For those unfamiliar, the ECOSOC Youth Forum is the United Nations' largest annual gathering of young people, convened by the Economic and Social Council at UN Headquarters in New York. It brings together youth delegates, Member States, UN agencies, and civil society to discuss progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. It's one of the few official UN spaces where young people are not just observers but active contributors to international policy. This year's theme was "Innovate, Unite and Transform: Youth Shaping the Road to 2030," and this April was my third time attending.

I keep coming back because ECOSOC is one of the few global spaces where young people aren't asked to audition for relevance. We are asked to help shape it. I was able to attend this year because of Unsinkable, a Canadian mental health charity that uses storytelling to bridge the gap between traditional mental health resources and lived experience. Their support put me in the room, but it also shaped what I said when I got there. You cannot talk about the future of education without talking about mental health. A young person who is not okay cannot learn.

The story I came to challenge

When I was twelve, I visited a school in India where my ancestral roots lie. The roof was patched together from old materials, and students sat on newspapers spread across the floor because there weren't enough desks. The children were eager to learn, despite outdated textbooks and overcrowded rooms. I wrote an idea in a notebook that day to help. Then I closed it. Because the world had told me it wasn't my turn yet.

That is the first narrative I came to ECOSOC to push back on: youth as future, not present. "Tomorrow's leaders" means not yet. And not yet is how we justify excluding young people from decisions affecting them now. I opened that notebook at fourteen, founded Project Power Global, and reached over fifty thousand young people across six countries. Change doesn't start big. It starts real, and then ripples outward.

The second narrative is the single story of youth. At UWC Adriatic, a classmate from Afghanistan and I shared a classroom, but our realities could not have been more different. When we treat youth as one voice, we erase everyone who doesn't fit.

The third is youth as beneficiaries, not builders. Every time young people are trusted to build, the outcomes are sharper, more honest, more lasting. That is the ripple we lose when we treat youth as passengers instead of architects.

Issue plus gift equals change

There's a formula I learned from a changemaker named Hannah Alper that has shaped how I understand this work: Issue + Gift = Change. You identify the issue. You bring your gift, your skill, your story, your platform. Combine the two and you create change.

This year, my issue was the future of education. UNESCO is launching its Post-2030 Education survey, asking young people what learning should look like beyond the SDG deadline. As part of the SDG4 Youth & Student Network, my role is to carry their answers into rooms where decisions get made. What struck me, and what I keep returning to, is how similar their answers were. Different languages, different political contexts, completely different education systems. And they kept saying the same things. Inclusivity. Equitability. Mental health woven into learning. Education that meets you where you are instead of asking you to contort yourself to meet it. Those gaps are not local problems. They are structural.

The conversations I didn't expect

One of the best parts of this year was meeting Nate, a fellow youth advocate from New Zealand who had also gone to UWC. Within minutes we had that particular shorthand that comes from people who've lived in a UWC house. There's something completely different about meeting a like-minded person face-to-face, and realizing your work has been moving in parallel directions on opposite sides of the planet. That's a ripple I didn't plan for.

I also wasn't expecting to be in dialogue with stakeholders from Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, and other countries navigating active conflict. Given the global moment, I had braced myself for silences. Instead, those voices were there, and young people from places where their governments cannot or will not speak to each other were finding ways to speak to each other. It reminded me of something I learned at UWC after October 2023: peace doesn't start with agreement. It starts with the willingness to actively listen, so the person in front of you feels, finally, that someone has heard them.

What I asked for, and what I wish more youth knew

I left the Forum with three calls to action. To young people: amplify one voice unlike yours, not as a gesture but as a discipline. To institutions: audit who is in the room, and open your spaces. To Member States: co-design at least one initiative this year with real youth decision-making power. Not consultation. Not advisory. Real power.

If you're going to ECOSOC for the first time: prepare yourself emotionally. The conversations are deep, sometimes heavy. You'll sit with people whose lived realities are difficult to hear while also holding your own grief about the state of the planet. This is again why organizations like Unsinkable matter. Advocacy without mental health support is not sustainable.

And don't go in trying to perform. Go in trying to listen. The most valuable thing I've taken from three years at ECOSOC is not anything I said on a panel. It's what I heard from the person sitting next to me at lunch.

The stories we tell about young people become the systems we build around them. It is time we let young people tell their own.

We are not the future. We are the present. We are co-creators of the systems we're inheriting, whether or not the systems are ready for us. The stone is in your hand. The water is right there. Throw it.

References

Save the Children (January 2026), Sudan: Children have lost about 500 days of learning due to war in one of the world's longest school closures.

UNESCO (March 2026), 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report: 273 million children out of school worldwide.