Global Capacities for a New Era
The global conversation about what young people need to thrive has reached a significant turning point. We are moving into an era where creative capacity — the ability to imagine alternatives, navigate ambiguity, and solve complex social problems — is recognised as a primary engine of social and economic resilience. From emerging international benchmarks to the escalating challenges of a volatile world to rapidly shifting workforce demands, a powerful consensus is forming: the capacity to think expansively, to create, and to connect ideas across disciplines is not a supplementary skill but a critical necessity for the 21st century.
Creative Youth Development (CYD) provides the framework for this transformation by intentionally integrating creative practice with holistic youth development. It is the animating force that turns a standard community space or programme into an environment of discovery, belonging, and genuine agency. Whether in a neighbourhood art studio, a social justice campaign, or a scientific laboratory, infusing these spaces with CYD principles ensures that young people are not merely building technical competencies, but are cultivating the creativity and self-efficacy to shape their own lives and influence the world around them.
Extended education — the global ecosystem of afterschool, vacation care, and out-of-school time programmes — is the vital infrastructure for this work. It offers the relational safety, flexibility, and time that formal schooling often cannot provide: space where creativity moves from a theoretical goal to a lived, embodied practice. This double issue of Extensions has brought together perspectives, research, and practice from across the globe to illuminate how extended education settings can — and must — become the primary incubators of creative capacity for the next generation.
What follows is a Call to Action — ten imperatives for advancing the field of Creative Youth Development globally and, with it, the creative futures of young people everywhere.
Creativity is not an enrichment add-on — it is a core foundational capacity. Because creativity is a primary driver of 21st-century problem-solving and well-being, it must be treated with systemic seriousness. Policymakers, funders, and educators must explicitly embed creativity as an essential component in the design of public policies, funding frameworks, and global learning and youth development strategies.
In an era of rising youth anxiety and a global mental health crisis, we must treat cultural and creative assets as essential health infrastructure — not luxuries, but lifelines. CYD provides critical upstream support that strengthens young people's protective factors and builds resilience before crisis occurs.
Design Psychologically Safe Environments
Create programme spaces that purposefully reduce emotional barriers — creative anxiety, the fear of failure, and the threat of social judgement — which too often cause young people to retreat or default to conventional ideas. Skilled practitioners establish psychological safety by explicitly acknowledging youth experience and helping them navigate the inherent discomfort of uncertainty and risk-taking. When environments hold the whole young person, creative expression becomes a pathway to strengthened mental health, a sense of belonging, and sustained well-being.
Foster Agency and Community Connection
Creative and cultural practices are not merely expressive — they are fundamental resources for building agency and creative self-efficacy. By centering young people in communities of creative practice, extended education programmes help them transform internal visions into civic action and meaningful community contribution.
To foster creative self-efficacy at scale, programmes must be led by professionals — teaching artists and science educators — specifically trained to facilitate deep learning in community settings. These practitioners serve as architects of creative ecologies, possessing the competence to bridge high-level disciplinary practice with intentional youth development. Recognise this expertise as specialised, invest in robust professional development pathways, and ensure that those who do this work are valued and remunerated accordingly.
Creativity is the heartbeat of all successful discovery — including in the technical sciences. Bring the freedom of the studio into the laboratory. Whether students are exploring data science, designing sustainable systems, or investigating chemical reactions, they excel when they can pursue unconventional possibilities and treat data, code, and materials as creative mediums for problem-solving. Shift towards disciplined creativity — using divergent thinking to explore boldly and convergent thinking to arrive at original, elegant solutions to real-world challenges.
Creativity is a primary tool for social mobilisation, community building, and democratic participation. By infusing civic spaces with artistic practice, we move beyond individual expression and towards active community dialogue and systemic change. Create platforms where young people use their creativity — from storytelling and poetry to documentary film, music, theatre, and visual art — to notice local challenges, challenge conventional thinking, and advocate for the resources and futures their communities deserve. Strengthen youth-led coalitions that harness creative expression to influence public opinion and drive social transformation.
To genuinely partner with young people, institutions must bridge the gap between token presence and actual power — ensuring that being 'in the room' translates into meaningful authority over policy decisions. Recognise that CYD builds the civic and relational capacity necessary to shape shared futures. Invest in institutional readiness: rather than simply preparing youth to navigate existing power structures, organisations and systems must reform themselves to enable authentic, shared decision-making with young people as full partners.
Researchers, evaluators, organisations, and funders should infuse research and evaluation with CYD values, so that data becomes a medium for storytelling and an instrument of equity rather than merely a compliance mechanism. Equip organisations to tell a more holistic story of the young people they serve — one that honours full identities, complex journeys, and genuine potential. Build collective data ecosystems where organisations share discoveries. Ensure that young people are not simply subjects of study, but co-researchers who help shape the questions being asked and the meaning derived from the answers.
The most pressing challenges of our time — climate change, AI ethics, economic inequality, social cohesion — are global in nature but are ultimately resolved by people who trust one another across difference and distance. CYD provides the programme structures through which the universal languages of poetry, music, theatre, and visual art can build those bridges. Facilitate immersive exchanges and co-creation opportunities that create conditions for young people to find common ground. Ensure that under-resourced and historically marginalised communities are central to global conversations, transforming creative practice into a platform for global citizenship and solidarity.
Support and invest in mission-aligned organisations with deep expertise in CYD — such as the Global Centre for Creative Youth Development™ — to serve as vital backbone infrastructure for the movement. These entities bridge the gap between local practice and international policy: helping to scale successful models, stimulating and disseminating research, building practitioner capacity, and advocating for creative development as an essential right of all young people. Intermediary investment is not overhead — it is the connective tissue of a thriving field.
To advance the field of CYD, we must build a robust and globally representative evidence base that documents how creative development unfolds within extended learning settings. Priority areas for research investment include:
Creative development and creative self-efficacy in informal learning environments
While foundational work has begun — including through initiatives such as the 3C Data Alliance — understanding how young people develop as creative thinkers and makers in extended education settings remains a vast and dynamic area ripe for systematic investigation.
Longitudinal impact
Tracking how sustained engagement in CYD programmes translates into well-being, social innovation, workforce readiness, and civic participation across diverse fields and life stages.
Global South perspectives
Funding and documenting CYD practices across the Global South to ensure that global research is not dominated by Western contexts and that the richness of diverse creative traditions informs the field.
Child and adolescent development
Synthesising research from developmental psychology, sociology, and extended learning science on how creative environments specifically influence social, emotional, and neurological development.
A Field in Motion: The Moment to Act is Now
The papers assembled in this double issue of Extensions represent more than a collection of research and practice perspectives — they are evidence of a field in motion. From classroom-based studies to cross-national collaborations, from practitioner reflections to policy analyses, they collectively make a compelling case: extended education is not the margins of young people's learning lives, but potentially its most transformative terrain.
Central to amplifying this recognition has been the work of the Global Extended Learning and Youth Development Association (GELYDA). Through its international symposia, collaborative research networks, and sustained commitment to elevating the voices of extended education practitioners and scholars from across the globe, GELYDA has played a defining role in bringing Creative Youth Development into sharper focus within international educational discourse. The GELYDA Symposia, in particular, have created rare and generative spaces where researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and young people themselves converge to examine what it truly means to develop the whole child across the full arc of their day, their week, and their life. The research and practice showcased in this issue reflects, in no small part, the scholarly community that GELYDA has helped to build and sustain.
The question before the extended education sector is no longer whether Creative Youth Development matters. The evidence gathered in this double issue answers that convincingly. The question is whether we — as a global community of practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and advocates — will rise to the moment with the urgency, the investment, and the collective will that young people deserve.
Extended education sits at a unique and powerful intersection. Unconstrained by the high-stakes accountability structures of formal schooling, it is free to honour the full complexity of young people's identities, interests, and aspirations. It is where a young person who has been told they are 'not creative' discovers that they are; where a student who has been invisible in the classroom becomes a leader; where the boundaries between art, science, civic life, and community dissolve into something richer and more real. This is not a peripheral function of education systems — it is a vital one.
The Call to Action presented in this summary is an invitation — to every practitioner designing a programme, every researcher shaping an evidence base, every policymaker allocating resources, every funder deciding what to sustain, and every leader building a sector. It is an invitation to treat creative capacity with the same seriousness, resourcing, and systemic intentionality that we bring to literacy and numeracy. It is an invitation to see extended education not as what happens when 'real learning' stops, but as a domain of profound developmental possibility in its own right.
We call on extended education leaders across the globe to advocate boldly within their systems for the recognition of creative capacity as a public good. We call on researchers to pursue the longitudinal, participatory, and cross-cultural studies that will deepen our collective understanding of how creativity develops — and what it makes possible — in young lives. We call on funders to move beyond project-by-project investment and commit to sustaining the intermediary infrastructure — organisations like GELYDA and its network partners — that makes field-wide learning and advocacy possible. And we call on policymakers to enshrine extended education and Creative Youth Development within national and international frameworks as essential, not elective, components of young people's rights to full participation in the world they will inherit and shape.
Creative Youth Development is not a programme model. It is a commitment — to expanding what young people, and by extension our societies, understand as possible. Every afternoon, every community centre, every extended learning space is an opportunity to make that commitment real.
Above all, we call on all of us to remain oriented towards the young person: curious, resilient, generative, and hungry for the opportunity to make something that matters. Our task is to ensure that the systems, programmes, and policies we build are worthy of that hunger — expansive enough to hold it, rigorous enough to develop it, and courageous enough to trust it.