The world desperately needs better leadership in this time of explosively fast change! The objective of the World Children’s Parliament (WCP) is to improve world leadership now through real child leaders - from grassroots to global levels. Discover how the WCP is creating spaces for child-adult mutual leadership, from humble neighborhoods to global forums. This Governance From Below website offers solid evidence that such mutual leadership can be like gold!
Also, check out the website designed and built by the members of the World Children's Parliament (WCP).
Governance From Below
Four Focus Areas
Leadership at Every Level
The World Children’s Parliament (WCP) meets the world’s need for better leadership by developing strong child leaders. It creates a simple yet inclusive structure. Children start by forming parliaments in their neighborhood or school. In these grassroots parliaments each child becomes a minister responsible for applying one or more United Nations Strategic Development Goals (SDGs) to their immediate neighborhood.
Other children take such roles as Prime Minister, Secretary, Treasurer – or project leader for issues of particular concern to the neighborhood.
These roles go upward to larger geographic areas via representatives elected by consent —
federating through zonal, regional, national, and international parliaments – gathering the
thoughts of all children to help shape big opinions and decisions.
We are aware of 300+ NGOs, many in India but also on every continent, that are building
assemblies along the children’s parliament model. In addition, the government of the State
of Tamil Nadu in India announced late in 2024 that it would implement this model in all of
its 36,000+ public schools.
Community Engagement
The need for better leadership is local as well as global. The objective is to develop child leaders in every social strata working with adults to provide their fresh stimulating capacities and innovative ways of thinking and doing for the well-being of all. Local children’s parliaments work closely with schools, faith groups, local NGOs, and grassroots initiatives to bring forth children from every background into leadership. Neighborhood circles enable children to talk, listen, decide by consent, and launch actions to solve real problems. For example, local parliaments in different places around the world have gotten rid of stagnant water, built good relationships with police, successfully petitioned to get needed bridges built, and collected food for the needy.
Children’s parliaments at higher levels of federation provide leaders for regions. For example, they have organized aid and been quickly on the scene of natural disasters. They helped an indigenous tribe get official recognition from the state after years of futile efforts by the tribe. In Chile, children’s parliaments contributed to re-writing the country’s constitution.
At the international level, a 16-year-old WCP member speaking at a United Nations side event led to a WCP partnership with the International Police Executive Symposium. The goal of the partnership is to conduct a demonstration experiment to use children’s parliaments and collective impact methods to reduce crime in the country of Belize. In early 2025, Children of the WCP participated in the UN’s annual review of articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by participating in General Comment 27, this year focused on UNCRC Article 40 concerning children’s legal rights.
Leveraging Technology
With its focus on the need for better global leadership, the WCP uses technology to create vessels
for mutual leadership at large, i.e. children, adults and all the people around even the vulnerable
ones for the common good. WCP knows how to connect leaders across time zones and languages. Children with the support of adult allies meet virtually through Zoom and other platforms to discuss societal challenges, co-create proposals, and decide on important issues when they learn how to use appropriate governance and management tools. One example is the WCP’s side event at the UN 2024 ECOSOC Youth Forum. See Item 5 on the official UN website documenting the event, including about 400 online participants.
Later in 2024 the WCP collected and consolidated opinions of 3000+ children from Australia, Austria,
Brazil, Cameroon, India, Nigeria, Poland, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States
and convened a Summit of the Children. The Summit paralleled the United Nations Summit of the
Future. Eighty representatives attended the Summit of the Children and adopted by consent
a WORLD CHILDREN’S PARLIAMENT DECLARATION ON FUTURE GENERATIONS.
Imagination Unleashed
One of the problems with current world leadership is it limits its thinking to just a few of the eight basic human intelligences – often dryly intellectual. Adult institutions, particularly government bureaucracies, typically don’t use play, drawings, skits, or music to stimulate imagination, reflection, and discovery. Stories, drawings, and skits are more than just fun—they’re how children make sense of the world and lead others.
One aspect of the objective to bring children into roles that involve mutual leadership is to bring in more creativity to governance, so much needed as we try to navigate current political tensions, impending climate disaster, threats from AI, etc.
Children’s parliaments often include play or music or drawing. For example, the development of the
World Children’s Parliament Declaration on Future Generations
, involved thousands of children making drawings and doing skits as part of the process of developing opinions about values they will use as they take over the future.
Governance From Below: Can Children Lead the Way?
Another aspect of the world’s critical leadership crisis is our tendency to mix leadership tightly and rigidly with ego and feelings of self-worth. The term “mutual leadership” hardly appears at all in management literature. Mutual leadership can mean handing around the leader role like bread at the dinner table. Part of the objective of bringing in child leaders is to help adults have an experience of mutual leadership. Adults can also have mutual leadership with each other. Every adult has an inner child, often adults work in hierarchies of power, they have different physical strengths, and so on. Adults can exercise mutual leadership with each other, and children can help them learn how to do it well. When everyone can help lead, we will all be better led!
Governance From Below: Can Children Lead The Way is a newly released book now available for order on LeanPub. We recommend selecting the “Read on your browser” option for immediate access. The book will soon be available on Amazon Kindle. A French edition and printed copies are also forthcoming. If you purchase now from LeanPub on or before 31 May 2025, you’ll receive the printed version at no additional cost. To benefit from this offer, please provide your contact details during purchase.
