On April 3rd and April 4th the Stavros Niarchos Foundation convened an international conference on youth unemployment in New York, Recharging the Youth: An International Conference on the Global Youth

Unemployment Crisis and the Need for Collective Action, bringing together economists, policy makers, foundations, NGOs, government officials and businesspeople to debate and analyze action-oriented collaboration on dealing with youth unemployment.

The conference was part of the Recharging the Youth  initiative which the Foundation announced in October 2013, committing a long-term grant of €100 million towards helping create new opportunities for Greece’s younger generations, which are severely impacted by the country’s current alarming unemployment rate.

The Foundation in collaboration with a number of partners on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in a leading role,  brought together leading labor economists, as well as experts in the areas of agriculture, entrepreneurship and culture/tourism for the purpose of proposing new analytically grounded initiatives to address youth unemployment. The goal was to bring on the table ideas unconstrained by supposed political limitations, and to use the conference and sustained follow-up to create practical pilot programs in Greece that can be used as proof of concept, and then implemented on a larger scale there and in other economies facing high youth unemployment.

Speeches, audiovisual material, and more information about the conference will be available online soon, in both English and Greek.