What is The Forum of Young Global Leaders?

The Forum of Young Global Leaders is a unique multi-stakeholder community of exceptional young leaders who shares a commitment to improve the state of the world. Each year the World Economic Forum identifies 200-300 extraordinary individuals, drawn from every region of the world. Together, they form a powerful international community that can dramatically impact the global future.

What is the purpose of this site?

Young Global Leaders are chosen to be part of a community of achievers who have ambitions for their societies and not just for themselves. Over the last two years, Young Global Leaders have been working on a series of initiatives and this website is dedicated to showcasing them and to linking them to larger efforts in various fields.

The initial stages of formulating taskforces to tackles issues that Young Global Leaders felt were the most pressing was inspired by the World Economic Forum launching ‘the Global Redesign Initiative’. This was an unprecedented global multi-stakeholder dialogue to provide a fresh, bottom-up rethinking of the nature of the systems, institutions and processes of global cooperation that the world needs in order to respond to 21st-century challenges. Based in large part on personal initiative and collective action, the Young Global Leaders task forces are producing results in many areas, including healthcare, social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

When the Forum of Young Global Leaders was first formed, one of the aspirations was “to integrate Young Global Leaders into processes which will allow them to have a real impact on global affairs and to make sure that global decision-making preserves the interests of the next generation”. The ideas presented here on Redesign Our World are the Young Global Leaders contributions to ‘improving the state of the world’.

YGL Steering Group

The YGL Steering Group aims to support the Young Global Leaders community and their taskforces. The first YGL Steering Group completed its task 2009-2010 and the second Steering Group was brought together at the end of 2010. Its members are:
Mina Al-Oraibi – Chair (Washington D.C., USA/ London, UK)
Andy Freire (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Kumi Fujisawa Tsunoda (Tokyo, Japan)
Katherine Garrett-Cox (Dundee, Scotland)
Parag Khanna (Washington, D.C., USA)
Juan Mario Laserna (Bogota, Columbia)
Jason Yat-sen Li (Shanghai, People’s Republic of China)
Tumi Makgabo (Johannesburg, South Africa)
Sandeep Naik (Mumbai, India)
Kristin Rechberger (Washington D.C., USA)
Josh Spear (New York, USA)

Who is responsible for the ROW logo?

This work was graciously donated by a YGL friend Ole Lund. In his own words, it was inspired by:

Euclidean geometry: The study of plane and solid figures on the basis of axioms and theorems.

The Flag: The flag belongs to the world, not to a government.

Rangoli patterns: Used in the past in India to please the deities and bring peace and harmony to the home.

Who is responsible for building this site?

The design and technical work was graciously donated by the wonderful people at Electric Pulp.