What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? Leadership, Power and Intergenerational Responsibility

About the Session The world is getting older. At the same time, younger generations are demanding a greater role in shaping the institutions, economies, and decisions they will inherit. Too often, these shifts are framed as a generational contest. Older leaders are told to step aside. Younger leaders are invited in but not always given meaningful authority. Organizations struggle with succession. Climate movements become divided between urgency and experience. Knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory can disappear during leadership transitions rather than being carried forward. But the challenges ahead are not generational battles that one side can win. Climate change, democratic renewal, development, care, and economic transition will require the lived experience, relationships, cultural knowledge, and institutional memory of older generations alongside the energy, ideas, and urgency of younger ones. The question is how to create genuine partnership between them. That requires more than putting different ages around the same table. How does one generation transfer knowledge and relationships without prescribing how the next generation should lead? How do established leaders share power while continuing to contribute? How can younger people gain real authority rather than symbolic representation? And what can culture, community, and traditions of intergenerational learning teach institutions that have become accustomed to thinking about leadership as an individual career? These questions are becoming more urgent as demographics shift. Aging populations, labor shortages, longer working lives, changing care needs, and leadership transitions are reshaping societies and organizations simultaneously. We need ways for generations to support one another rather than treating demographic change solely as a problem of succession or dependency. This session will ask participants to think beyond who leads next toward a deeper question: what are we responsible for passing on, and what kind of ancestor do we want to be? What to Expect An intergenerational conversation about leadership, power, responsibility, culture, and long-term stewardship. Participants will explore what meaningful collaboration between generations looks like in organizations, communities, climate action, democratic spaces, and the changing world of work and care. The discussion will consider both transition and continuity: when to step forward, when to make space, what knowledge should be carried forward, and how generations can build something together rather than simply handing leadership from one to another. Who This Is For This session is for leaders across generations, youth and youth-led organizations, organizational and movement leaders, climate practitioners, funders, community leaders, employers, people navigating leadership transitions, and anyone thinking about what we owe the generations before and after us. What You Will Get Out of It A framework for thinking about intergenerational partnership beyond succession Perspectives on sharing power while preserving knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory Approaches to giving younger generations meaningful authority rather than symbolic inclusion Lessons from culture and community about transferring values and knowledge across generations Space to consider your own responsibility to the people and institutions that come after you