Beyond International Youth Day: Demanding more than optics

When we talk about youth action for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), discussions rarely move beyond flattened, even infantilizing focuses on innovation, energy and idealism. Youth-led work is too often met with a superficial celebratory tone, one that masks deeper condescension and overlooks the substance, strategy and impact of our contributions.

Youth are not simply implementing the SDGs — we are reinterpreting them. We challenge the myth of universality and cultivate action that is rooted in lived and living realities.

Local action doesn’t mean small-scale or simple. The challenges youth face in advocating for and realizing change are direct confrontations with systems of power, control, privilege and oppression. It’s not just about advancing global goals, it’s about navigating and resisting structures that were never meant to serve or include us.

As we look beyond the SDGs, we must ask: what frameworks will succeed them? And will youth have shaped those frameworks, or just been invited to promote someone else’s vision?

The SDGs give us a shared language, but real progress requires more than chasing targets. It demands that we interrogate the power dynamics that shape and sustain them.

In what is colonially known as Canada, the façade of niceness and progressiveness often obscures the structural violence that youth continue to endure. While Canada is a global funder,  domestic grassroots voices have long been calling attention to structural inequalities in funding. 

We are in crisis. Deteriorating under the weight of austerity, bureaucracy and neglect. The hardest hit are grassroots and community-based organizations and activists, with youth carrying a compounded burden.

In truth, we are operating in a context where youth work barely exists as a recognized or resourced field. There is no real culture, infrastructure or sustained support for youth-led or youth-centred organizing in Canada. Instead, funds and power flow downward sporadically from large, centralized and professionalized organizations disconnected from on-the-ground realities.

The ecosystem for youth organizing isn’t just fragile — it’s chronically under-resourced to the brink of collapse.

Youth are expected to show up — often to our own detriment — navigating harm, unpaid labour, and the persistent need to justify our worth in spaces never built with us in mind. This goes far beyond tokenism. It is systemic performance masquerading as inclusion.

Youth are an afterthought. Our labour is extracted, our voices “showcased”, but our material realities and structural needs remain unaddressed. We’re brought in after decisions are made. We’re invited to photo ops and siloed youth bodies to boost optics, but excluded from spaces where power is exercised and resources are allocated.

And yet, when institutions falter, it is often youth-led initiatives that respond.

We cannot speak about “global solidarity” while ignoring the unmet needs of the youth doing this work. Going beyond the SDGs means youth defining the future, not just delivering someone else’s vision of it. It means adequately compensating labour and funding youth-led work directly. It means grounding funding agendas, priorities and commitments in local truths, shaped not from ivory towers, but from the ground up.

Youth are not a checkbox or a sidenote to someone else’s agenda. We are strategists, organizers and seasoned architects of social change. Our work is not future potential — it is a force for present-tense impact.

If the global development sector is truly committed to meaningful change, it’s time to cede space, resources and decision-making power. And let’s be clear: this won’t be painless. It’s not meant to be. It means reckoning with the loss of control, the redistribution of influence and resources, and a realignment of who gets to decide.

Bio

Rae Jardine is a Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) professional with over a decade of experience driving youth-centred social impact. Rae currently serves as the Executive Director of SRHR Hubs, a loud, proud, youth-led organization championing SRHR. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from St. Thomas University, a Master of Arts in Global Development Studies from Queen’s University, and a Diploma in Social Service Work. With a strong political consciousness and critical thinking skills developed early in life, Rae has carried these strengths into her work across both Canadian and global contexts, advocating for and advancing policies and programs that elevate youth voices, challenge systemic inequities, and expand access to rights-based services.

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