For more than three decades, NDI has supported political party youth wings as a means of engaging young people in formal politics. Youth wings are semi-independent bodies within a political party. Although structures differ, most youth wings have an established age for membership (e.g., 16-35), work to initiate young people into party politics and strengthen a party’s ability to address youth-specific policy issues – among other core functions. Organized youth wings, across party systems, are indicative of an important minority of young people trying to satisfy political aspirations through political party involvement. Youth wings can be a source of creativity and dynamism within a political party and are enabled when they have opportunities to shape party policies and participate in decision making.

For our bipartisan dinner, we developed a video compilation, which asked our partners one single, powerful question: “What does democracy mean to you?” The video responses we collected included both a one word answer and a 15 second explanation on the meaning of democracy. The result was amazing.

Just weeks before the annual Concordia Summit in New York, NY on September 19th and 20th, the National Democratic Institute and Concordia partnered to host a TweetTalk as an extension of the panel, “Helping Democracy Deliver: Tunisia as an Example of Economic and Political Transition.” Like the panel, the TweetTalk aimed to explore themes like extremist activity in Libya as a threat to Tunisian progress, and whether decentralization can address regional inequalities.