Kids 2020 & the Summit for The Future

It’s not often that a project comes into our lives that inspires and feeds our business, personal and community worlds at the same time. This is the case with Kids 2020 , which will make its debut at the Club of Amsterdam's Summit for the Future – Vision & Strategies for 2020 . During January 26-28th 2005, The Summit will gather thought leaders from throughout Europe and other parts of the world in Amsterdam to discuss and explore the potential visions and strategies for the year 2020.

Kids 2020 will provide the backdrop and context for Summit for the Future as a multi-media exhibition. The first results of interviews and workshops with children from different cultures and different countries between ages 9 - 11 will shape this exhibition. The top 10 visions and strategies created by these children will run as filmed interviews, hang as framed points of reference, and draw attention to the world illustrated by these children as they envision their role in it. They will represent an insight into future society for the participants in the Summit. The first results of this project will be packaged as a book, DVD, and reproduced as a mini-exhibition for private display, available for the conference and later through online distribution.

Kids 2020 provokes children to take a look at their future world and asks them to play specific leadership roles in these discussions. Those 3 leadership roles - material, relationship, or conceptual based – focuses their thinking as they engage with questions and processes to guide them in their mini-forums. Their output is how they develop their ideas about the future 16 years from now and determine how to move those ideas into action.

We are using social media as access platforms for reaching children from many different places in the world. The same methodology is used, but we have created the room for cultural adaptation. Children can access the methodology, make their contributions and share their visions and strategies using this weblog. We hope to create the opportunity and space as well for them to share their maps, drawings, films, photography and music related to this project. Their collective intelligence should help inform the world by giving children a channel for their voice, and build wisdom and a higher sense of awareness in our society, locally and globally. Over time, we hope that these children will build a global network of their own, exploring a shared future together.

Now our task becomes finding financial partners to underpin the resources to continue the research and produce and deliver Kids 2020 into diverse exhibitions throughout the world with the book, film cuts and other merchanidising materials. We hope these partners may want to play an extended role because the exhibition could also travel to different countries, augmented by contributions from local children to make the exhibition particularly relevant for each location.

Colby Stuart and Adriaan Wagenaar are the concept developers behind this project. We are both consultants on innovation and branding, and decided to partner our talents to build a business model based on the contribution of children to inform an adult world and its political, organizational and business processes. Stuart published Kids Club Magazine for 12 years for one of her clients, PBS (Public Broadcasting System) in the USA. Wagenaar has worked with the philosophy of children to build wisdom for brands like Robeco and Centre Parcs in The Netherlands. We live in Amsterdam and work with many cultures. Earlier this year, we established

The Dutch Connection, a multi-cultural club with members from around the world focused on collaboration, sharing culture and building creativity into our lives. Through this community of 189 members from 26 countries, we have begun to establish the network for the Kids 2020 research.

Club of Amsterdam develops forums for generating platforms of interest to shape your future in the Knowledge Society, the world we live in today.