Event: Intergenerational Values Knowledge Café 12 and 19 October 2023

World Values Day October 19th, 2023

World Values Day is an annual campaign to increase worldwide awareness and practice of values.

It allows us to think about our most deeply held values and explore and act on them with others.

This year’s theme is Values Bring Us Together.

World Values Day Knowledge Café

Charles Fowler and I have run a Knowledge Café for the last seven years as part of World Values Day. Charles helps coordinate World Values Day. He is part of the Steering Group of the UK Values Alliance and is Chair of the Human Values Foundation.

This year we plan to do something a little different. In partnership with Hank Kune of Educore, we plan to initiate an intergenerational dialogue, “Conversations about Values”, about the values we hold and what people want the world to be like ten years from now — the values that bring us together.

This Intergenerational Knowledge Café will be held on October 19th, at times and in time zones, that encourage people in different parts of the world to talk with each other.

We currently plan to host two Knowledge Café on October 12th and October 19th in the European time zone, suitable for the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, Africa, and the Middle East participants. If there is sufficient interest, we may later run additional Cafés for other time zones.

These events are also being held as part of Knowledge Management Week, an initiative organized by the Knowledge Management Global Network (KMGN).

Hank Kune

Hank launched Educore 30 years ago to support projects and people in user-centered innovation processes. Working from the Netherlands, he takes part in innovation projects throughout the world. These projects often involve the collaboration of ecosystems of multi-party stakeholders. The integration of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit characterizes this work.

A large part of his work aims at addressing societal innovation and supporting projects seeking to create sustainable futures. Societal innovation requires thoughtful, dedicated collaboration across sectors, cultures, generations, and borders of all kinds, aspiring to discover what is needed to make ‘the impossible’ possible – and then do it.

What kind of future do we want to live in? What is the future asking us? How much attention do we pay to the voices in society still struggling to be heard?

Working with Future Center concepts – he co-founded the Future Center Alliance in 2010 – is a powerful way to achieve this goal.

Intergenerational Illiteracy

There is a lot of talk about what different generations want and how young and old can better understand each other. How can we ever work together if we don’t understand the values that drive us?

• Young people: What’s important to young people (rarely paid attention to by society’s decision-makers, at least until they reach the age to vote).
• Older people: Who is listening to the ideas of our elders (so often consigned to grandparenting after retiring from professional work)?

Together, these two target groups make up one-third of the population of Europe (just as an example), and few pay attention to what they think.

“Conversations about Values” is about people in different countries and continents thinking and talking together. It’s about young people dreaming of the world and elders dreaming of the future, empowering young and old to understand each other’s values and realize each other’s dreams.

Our longer-term intention is to use this ‘moment’ to launch a series of intergenerational dialogues during the coming year, building a living library of shared ideas that can be translated into further conversations about how to realize them — as shared deeds —  in the years to come.

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We want an equal balance of younger (16 -18 years old) and elders (over the age of 60). Our ideal is 25 elders from several countries and an equal number of 25 youngers.

As the Café will be during school term time, ideally, we would like five schools from a few different countries to participate, with each school contributing five students with a mix of genders.

If you are a school teacher (even if not in the European time zone) and you are interested in having your school participate in an Intergenerational Café, please get in touch (david.gurteen@gurteen.com).

If you are an elder, you can register below:

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Photo Credits: Midjourney (Public Domain)