Cross-posted from my Substack, edited with AI for the Forum.
Epistemic status: personal essay, not research. The core observation comes from one conference agenda I checked by hand, plus messages from other young advocates. I'm 23, from Mexico, and I lead Flockwork, the skilled-volunteer matching platform at Vegan Hacktivists. I also sit on a youth advisory board at a large animal rights organization. I've tried to flag where I'm confident and where I'm not.
If you spend any time in animal advocacy, you've heard some version of this. It might be the sector's favorite thing to say about young people.
I started organizing at 19. I'm 23 now, and by the UN's definition, where youth runs from 15 to 24, I have about a year left in the category. So I've heard the line a lot, and lately I keep getting stuck on a question: do we actually mean it? If the next generation really is the future, why do so many of us feel absent from the present?
First, what this isn't. It isn't a callout of any one organization, conference, or person. I've met people in this movement who genuinely show up for young advocates, who mentored me and opened doors I couldn't have opened myself. Some of them were on the very stages I'm about to describe. This isn't about them. It's about a pattern they're standing inside too.
Earlier this year, two peers and I applied to run a workshop at a major movement conference. We're all young, all broke students. The session wasn't for us: it was for nonprofit staff and mid-to-senior people. The pitch was an honest, Gen Z insider's read on what our generation actually connects with online. Not "how to become a vegan influencer," but why most advocacy content only reaches people who already agree, and what would make someone our age actually stop scrolling.
We were rejected. That alone would be fine; being turned down is part of doing anything. But it was our second no. Before applying to speak, all three of us had separately applied for travel support to attend, and all three of us were turned down. So I went anyway, and went through the agenda looking for the youth programming that had beaten us.
I found one line: a 20-minute breakout on a Friday afternoon about "inspiring the next generation." It was led by an established advocate, someone doing great work and well over 30, telling a room of nonprofit staff how to reach people like me. The one time the next generation appeared on the agenda, we were the topic, not the speakers.
Over four days, more than fifty sessions, and well over 100 speakers, I could not identify a single speaker within the UN's youth range of 15 to 24.
Here's how I got there, so you can judge it. I looked up every speaker I could find, one by one, using public bios, LinkedIn, graduation years, org pages. Where I couldn't find an age, I used career stage and graduation years as a rough guide.
The limits matter:
"We need youth" can be a real commitment, or it can be a thing you say. My sense is that a lot of the time, it's a thing you say. Young people get discussed, researched, and recruited. We are far less often trusted with leadership, invited into the rooms where decisions happen, or handed anything real to shape. The invitation is to join, rarely to decide.
What stays with me is that we weren't even asking for power. No board seat, no keynote, no say in strategy. We were offering the one thing we're uniquely qualified to give: an honest account of our own generation. If there's no room for young people even when we show up as obviously "useful," what does "the future" mean?
In practice, it often means free or nearly-free labor. Unpaid fellowships and internships, or a small stipend attached to a big pile of work. "Early career" treated as a permanent discount on your worth. Some organizations build a genuinely warm home for young advocates, and they're the good ones. But a program you're welcomed into for a year or two can't protect you once you step outside it, into a job market that asks for three years of experience to get the job that would give you three years of experience.
Being young is one barrier. Being young and Latin American stacks another on top. Young people are already rare in these rooms; young people from Latin America are rarer still.
I at least speak English. Many brilliant advocates across Latin America don't, and that alone quietly locks them out of the "global" movement: its stages, its calls scheduled for someone else's time zone. For advocates across the Global South, the barriers stack up before anyone reads your idea: the cost, the visa, the language, the time zone.
So the people who make it onto a stage aren't there only because their ideas were better. They're often there because something made it possible: an org, a salary, a passport, a first language. Showing up comes with a tax, and it feels like earning your place twice.
I think this is a talent problem, not only a fairness problem.
Since publishing, people I'd never met messaged me with versions of the same story dozens of times. Someone who finally got onto a youth panel, then couldn't get it funded. Someone applying for role after role, told they need experience they can't get. People who tried to start their own projects, only to learn you need a track record to get the funding that builds a track record.
Nearly every message ended the same way: so I've started looking at other careers. These are anecdotes, not data, and the people who wrote to me are self-selected. But if the pattern holds, the movement is losing people who already care, already have skills, and would cost relatively little to keep. We don't seem to lose them because they stop caring. We lose them because caring, unpaid and unseen, for years, isn't sustainable.
Two things make this worth taking seriously:
A few pushbacks I expect, and where I land on them:
If you run an org, build an agenda, or fund this work, none of this is radical, and I think all of it fits inside one budget cycle:
I started volunteering because I love this work, and that hasn't changed. There's nothing wrong with starting at the bottom; we all start somewhere. But there is something wrong with a movement that calls young people its future while losing the ones standing right in front of it.
If you're young and something here felt familiar: you're not imagining it. Your read on this movement is worth something now, not in ten years.
If you're further along, you know your levers better than I do. I'd love to learn from you in the comments:
We are asked to join the movement. Far less often are we asked what it should become.
