Changemakers: Kate Robertson

Millennials are often dismissed as irresponsible “snowflakes”. This couldn’t be further from the truth for businesswoman Kate Robertson, who co-founded One Young World a decade ago, an organisation dedicated to inspiring the next generation of global leaders. Her aim? To find and support the next Nelson Mandelas. There’s no shortage of them, she says.

Through One Young World, Robertson rubs shoulders with young people who are making the world a better place – whether it’s advocating for education in Brazil (Tabata Amaral, 26); challenging  the status quo when it comes to equal rights in Saudi Arabia (Loujain al-Hathloul, 29, a political prisoner after campaigning for women’s right to drive); or standing up for free speech in Hong Kong (Joshua Wong, 22, was deemed one of the “world’s greatest leaders” by Fortune magazine while still a teenager, and faces years in prison for his pro-democracy beliefs).

Robertson and One Young World co-founder David Jones work not simply to encourage and enable young people in their battles for social justice, but make leaders out of them – and in the process, accelerate positive change globally.

Why good leadership matters

“I’ve always felt there were vacuums of good leadership around the world and whenever it occurred, there were consequences beyond what was immediately foreseeable,” Robertson says. It is young people, she points out, who are forced to carry the burden of bad leadership, “From the housing crisis to the financial crisis, the lack of jobs and a culture of spiralling debts, it’s the young who ultimately lose out because of poor governance by those in power.”