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The Charter for Compassion Global Youth Conference 2025 marked a powerful evolution in the Charter’s youth programming, expanding from its inaugural year into a comprehensive global convening that positioned compassion as a methodology for leadership, systems change, and collective action.
With 744 registrations from 61 countries, this year’s conference reflected both remarkable growth and the increasing resonance of the Charter’s message among youth worldwide. The three day virtual conference (October 28-30, 2025) brought together young changemakers, educators, and peacebuilders to explore how compassion can move beyond inspiration and become a practical foundation for leadership and social transformation.
The 2025 conference theme Compassionate Leadership for Action & Impact invited participants to step into a practice based model of leadership. Attendees examined how compassion can be operationalized within movements, how young people can intervene within systems, and how leadership can be modeled through responsibility, relationality, and courage, even amid burnout and global uncertainty.
A key feature of our 2025 conference was our partnership with KidsRights, who curated the closing day through their State of Youth platform. Their programming featured youth-led campaigns, policy driven advocacy, and cross border collaboration opportunities, showcasing the voices of young advocates shaping compassionate action worldwide.
A highlight of this year’s conference was the powerful keynote address by Dr. Lyla June Johnston, Indigenous scholar, musician, and activist, who inspired attendees with her reflections on leadership rooted in ancestral wisdom, reverence for the Earth, and community centered compassion. Drawing from her background in Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate studies in Indigenous Pedagogy, and her work on pre-colonial Indigenous food systems, Dr. Lyla June reminded participants that compassion is an interpersonal value and a force that sustains both people and planet.
The conference also celebrated a milestone moment for the Charter with the presentation of the Charter for Compassion’s first-ever Compassionate Youth Award - an award that honors an outstanding youth who cultivates equity, justice, and human dignity through their work. We were thrilled to award Talibah Abdul-Wahid with our Compassionate Youth Award 2025. The celebration included a special tribute from members of Talibah’s community followed by Talibah’s own powerful acceptance message. Talibah is a compassionate leader, advocate, and law student dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion through service and community empowerment. As a survivor of domestic violence and someone who deeply connects with the stories of others Talibah is a lifelong advocate for social impact, and has served as a foster parent to children in crisis, including five young women during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering stability and care during a time of uncertainty. In their Westside Las Vegas neighborhood, they founded mentorship, financial literacy, and scholarship programs for low-income, first-generation college students, helping build pathways to higher education and generational opportunity.
Panels: Compassion in Action Across Global Crises
The conference featured five multi track youth panels, each offering a unique lens into how compassion informs leadership across urgent global issues:
- From Crisis to Compassion: Youth Leading Humanitarian Responses in Times of Conflict explored how young leaders respond to war, displacement, and humanitarian crises through peacebuilding, advocacy, and community care.
- Identity & Liberation: Youth Movements for Indigenous Justice & Decolonization examined how compassion supports cultural resilience, liberation, and decolonial advocacy, with particular attention to Indigenous movements and the genocide in Palestine.
- From Knowledge to Action: Educating the Peace Makers of Tomorrow hosted by the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates focused on peace education as a transformative tool for building coexistence and global understanding.
- Compassion for the Planet: Youth Driving Climate Action & Environmental Justice highlighted youth-led efforts to confront extractive systems, restore ecosystems, and design regenerative, people centered climate solutions.
- Compassionate Peacebuilding: The Role of Youth in Global Solidarity and Dialogue featured young leaders advancing nonviolence, reconciliation, and cross-border cooperation in divided or polarized environments.
Across all five panels, participants shared lived experiences, critical insights, and actionable strategies, demonstrating compassion as a guiding principle for effective, ethical leadership.
Youth-Led Sessions & Capacity Building Workshops
The conference featured a range of youth-led sessions, highlighting community-based initiatives and advocacy efforts led by young people across regions and lived realities. These sessions reflected compassion in action, spanning gender justice, environmental stewardship, mental health storytelling, and grassroots education initiatives expanding access in underserved communities, among many others. Collectively, they showcased the power of youth leadership grounded in lived experience and reaffirmed the Charter’s commitment to centering young people as knowledge holders, innovators, and agents of change.
These youth-led sessions were intentionally interwoven with capacity-building workshops designed to strengthen participants’ skills for compassionate leadership in practice. Workshop topics included Digital Empathy and Responsible Communication, Restorative Justice and Conflict Transformation, Systems Thinking for Social Change, and Compassionate Peacebuilding in Practice.
Through highly interactive and reflective learning spaces, participants gained practical frameworks to apply compassion across organizing, advocacy, and everyday leadership, translating moral intention into sustained, skillful impact.
Youth-led sessions and capacity-building workshops supported participants in exploring three core leadership pillars foundational to the Charter’s approach:
- Inner Capacity Building: cultivating self-awareness, resilience, and emotional regulation
- Interpersonal Competence: strengthening dialogue, collaboration, and conflict navigation
- Systems Orientation: developing policy literacy, community design, and structural compassion
Impact & The Movement Ahead
By the end of the conference, a growing global cohort of youth leaders had emerged, equipped with the moral clarity, practical tools, and collective resolve to translate compassion into meaningful action within their communities. Participants shared that they left the conference with a renewed sense of purpose, deeper connection, and a commitment to building networks that extend far beyond the conference, supporting local and global initiatives rooted in justice, compassion, and interdependence.
We continue to be honored that our Global Youth Conference 2025 strengthened the Charter’s position as a global platform bringing young leaders together to advance action aligned with global citizenship, and compassion based leadership. It underscored a foundational truth within the Charter’s work - that compassion is not passive, it is a courageous practice that has the power to reshape systems and narratives, and that it is through compassionate leadership that we can nurture a more just, peaceful, and interconnected world.
