At the heart of everything we do is Youth Power.
We are a non profit locally led, globally connected network that supports the collective power of young leaders to create a better world.
More than ever the world needs young people’s power and leadership to solve its greatest challenges. Every year we train, mentor, nurture and connect thousands of young people to use their youth power and lead change.
Powering Youth Civil Society As A Trusted Intermediary
We have a strong track record of training and resourcing youth organisations, movements and unregistered groups, ensuring youth-led decision making and engagement throughout. Explore our role as an intermediary empowering youth organisations across the globe!
How we work is as important as what we do.
We take a power shifting approach.
We want to proactively shift power to ensure every young person is able to lead and create a better world.
We are feminist, inclusive, gender transformative and anti-racist in our work. We recognise the barriers that women, girls, non-binary people, people living with disabilities, and young people of different ethnicities, religion and sexual preferences face in the communities in which we work. We recognise historical power inequalities and aim to decolonise development.
Strategy
Our strategy guides our work with young people, partners, communities and governments.
Restless Development’s Strategy
Learn more about how we support youth power to create a better world.
Read our strategyImpact priorities
We have a track record of delivering programmes with impact. We work on the issues that young people care about the most – we react and respond to the world around us. Our work mostly falls into the following four impact priority areas.
Our approach
Youth-led Change
We support young people to lead change, providing opportunities, and helping build confidence, networks and skills to lead initiatives that have a lasting impact.
- Youth training and empowerment – Young people are provided with tailored training, support, networks and mentors enabling young people to learn, adapt, grow, and ultimately thrive.
- Community mobilisation – Young people change behaviour or mobilise action in their communities to respond to long-standing challenges such as child marriage or gender-based violence, as well as more pressing emergencies such as disease outbreaks or climate related disasters.
- Youth-led accountability – Young people are supported to advocate and hold decision-makers to account.
- Youth-led research – Young people capture key insights on issues that matter most to them, and use it to inform policy and practice.
Youth Collective
Our youth-led research has highlighted the challenges faced by youth civil society. We know that youth groups and organisations have the skills, connections and lived experience to make real change in their communities, but they are often overlooked. We want to see a youth civil society that is thriving, not just surviving.
We have established the Youth Collective to provide a global community for youth-led organisations. The Youth Collective’s aim is to help youth civil society thrive and lead change at a time in history when it’s needed most.
The Youth Collective is made up of around 4,000 youth groups, organisations and movements around the world. We support them by sharing funding opportunities, creating space for connection and collaboration, increasing visibility, and opening dialogue with donors and funders to better support their work. Find out more about the Youth Collective.
Education enables you to be self-reliant and independent
Serah, Sierra Leone
Restless experts
We provide advice and guidance to institutions, governments, partners and corporations, supporting them to develop strategies and approaches that include young perspectives.
Many of our advisory services start with youth-led research and progress to youth-led change. We have a growing evidence base on a number of issues including: Education; the Impact of climate change on youth livelihoods; the Impact of global heating on health; Covid-19 and youth resilience.
Where we work.
We are independently registered and governed in nine countries: India, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, UK, USA, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
We are a global team of more than 200 people based in 13 countries, bound together by our vision for youth power.
We host a growing youth collective of almost 4,000 youth organisations in 185 countries.
Annual Report.
Our latest Annual Report includes information about our impact, stories from young people, and our financial accounts.
Download the report.Discover more.
