Youth Democracy Forum

The Global Liberal Arts Alliance  is joining with Deree-The American College of Greece as Education Partner for the prestigious Athens Democracy Forum (ADF) to be held in Athens, Greece, October 1-3, 2025. The  Forum is organized by the Democracy and Culture Foundation in association with The New York Times and attracts a broad range of participants from around the world. Panels and workshops will emphasize the “Do” part of the Democracy and Culture Foundation’s Think-Talk-Do impact chain.

The 2025 Forum will explore “new visions for hard realities” in the aftermath of the “year of elections” that produced mixed results for democracy. Despite the disparate outcomes, the people expressed two themes: disaffection and a hunger for change. The 2025 Forum will take stock of these forces and how to harness their power.  Participants will analyze the realities that must be reckoned with – social upheaval, economic insecurity, concurrent wars, the onslaught of tech advancements, the chaos of the climate crisis – as well as the political opportunists who might take advantage of them. The 2025 Athens Democracy Forum will open with an Oxford-style debate on The State of Democracy. Other sessions will include regional case studies (Brazil and the Green Economy; South Korea: Cracks in Democracy; Ukraine Through the Prism of Europe), “rethinking” sessions (Rethinking Populism; Rethinking War; Rethinking Trade), Tools for Democracy, Bright Ideas, and a new focus for the forum, Future Visions, that will consider new ways of structuring (or not) society, governments, and institutions. 

Through a two-level competitive application process, 24 students from schools in the Global Liberal Arts Alliance will be selected to participate in the Forum as student delegates. We aspire for the student delegates to make meaningful contribution to the Forum, to communicate their thinking and experiences both to their home campuses and to the Alliance, and to present a plan of action to their home institutions for addressing a specific challenge identified at the Forum.