Reflections on the YouthxYouth Weavership Residency 2025

Distance is nothing, connection is everything.

The real power of weavership* is the way it puts hope in motion. Imagine you can see the world in its entirety, and little lights glimmer in every corner, shining out amongst the brokenness. Humans, like lights in darkness, who want to make a difference, who have love in their hearts and compassion for others in spades. These people are miles and miles apart but stand together through the power of shared convictions. Here are the people who blow you away; people with an ability to be beautifully articulate,brave, bold and determined. Humans who ask important questions, and lots of them. Humans who want to really understand the experience of others and to see what can be built from mutual respect and shared belief that we can - and should - do better. By giving time to be together and listen to one another,the sense of hope ever increases. And that is more powerful than we can ever imagine.

So, what happens when two people called Beth from across the globe meet, as part of the YouthxYouth 10-month capacity-building WeavershipResidency fellowship programme**?

From Beth B

In my role at Big Change. I often find myself grappling with the drier side of running a charity, the important, but sometimes frustratingly bureaucratic components of compliance, governance and finance. So, being given the opportunity to explore the beauty of intergenerational collaboration through this weavership residency journey, was a real gift.

This is the second year that Big Change have signed up to be a host for this programme and we were partnered with BethKaruana Mwai, who has been collaborating with us, bringing with her passion,commitment and insightful perspectives. She has connected us with her network and brought her life-lens to our work. She has contributed to our intergenerational strategy, researched leaders in our scouting funding round,and taken our ‘Voices for Change’ social media campaign to a global audience.The work has been thoughtfully and carefully delivered, and we are so grateful.

But that’s not what I have valued the most.

As someone who is used to focusing on the practical and process of things, leaning into relationship building, pointing my compass to the importance of the journey, rather than the destination, has opened my mind to new ways of thinking about how we can work together to make the world a better place. Yes, we have worked on tangible tasks and set helpful objectives together, but the richness has come from our conversations, and the knowledge that across the globe there is someone else who cares about the same things, who shares the same motivations. On our GoogleMeet screen, we talked about the importance of working together to make life better for all young people and shared the hopes we have for the future. Beth told me about other people she has met, and the organisations that have inspired her, and I looked these up, read, and learned.

It’s transformed how I prioritise.  

I am now determined to permit myself time for conversations with others. With a role like mine, the to-do list is highly varied, can be demanding and time-bound - I have to pivot, re-focus and respond. It can be very reactive to others’ needs. And I love all of that! But what I have been missing is the richness that comes from opening up time to listen. Really listen. To other people’s experiences and learnings of the Big Change HQ. From now on, I will give priority to these connection opportunities and embrace the pathways they open. Hearing what others have to say - and responding to the richness in their experiences sparks the energy needed to move forward.

True intergenerational collaboration often comes in unexpected forms. I played the role of host in this residency programme, butI have come to realise that Beth also hosted me. She trusted me with her aspirations and allowed me to participate in her journey. She took the light that was sparked through her weaving, and wove it further still, using BigChange as a vessel. She created change in me, sharing not just my name, but my drive to create impact.

Together, we listened, heard, responded and further fuelled hope. Because distance is nothing, and connection is everything.

From Beth Karuana (BethK.):

Early 2025, I can’t recall the exact date, I found myself on a calm, rainy night, curled up on my sister’s couch, scrolling through Google feeds. Usually, I browse for opportunities, intriguing news, or simply anything to remind me why I’m not a social media fanatic. And suddenly, I paused.

“Weavership Fellowship”, an opportunity announced on Opportunity Desk, caught my eye. Weavership? I wondered. The word stirred something in my heart. As a child, I was a weaver. I would gather makuti grass from my neighbor’s field and try to shape it into baskets. Ironically, I never managed to finish one properly; they always broke before they could stand. Yet I remained enchanted by the art weaving.

There is something about a woven product I can’t quite name — the way threads come together into something whole, the thought that it began as an idea in someone’s hands and became something beautiful. That mystery has always drawn me in. So you will find me carrying a woven basket to the market, to the beach, on picnics, or even wrapped in a woven blanket. The only place I haven’t carried a woven basket, I think, is the office.

Could this fellowship transform my childhood fascination into reality? As I read through the details, I had so many aha moments. It wasn’t about weaving grass as I once imagined, it was something deeper, something I felt deeply connected to. And as fate would have it, I stayed awake until 3 a.m., pouring my heart into the application.

So what was the Weavership really about? To answer that, I turn to what the past nine months at YouthxYouth and my time as a residency weaver at Big Change have taught me, alongside my uplifter, Beth Boxall.

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Weaving is listening. Yes, as surprising as that may sound, weaving is listening. When I first received the email that I had been placed at Big Change for my weavership residency and paired with Beth B as my uplifter, I was excited for what the future held, but I was also anxious about the process. Would we be a good fit? In such a short period of time, would I truly come to know what makes Beth tick, and would I be able to make an impact at Big Change? After the residency was over, would I look back and say it was a journey worth taking — and mean it?

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And so our weavership journey began with active listening.

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On our first call, what struck me most was how much of it was simply listening. Beth created space for me; she didn’t rush or fill the silence. She listened with intention. In her openness, I felt invited to bring my whole self into the conversation. She shared her work, her passions, and the challenges she was navigating at Big Change, but she also left room for me to reflect and respond.

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As the weeks unfolded, I realized that impact wasn’t about grand gestures or quick fixes. Whether we were working on a project or simply checking in, each conversation added a thread. And sometimes, in the pauses, I was reminded that weaving is not about speed but about presence. It is about showing up, hearing what is said and unsaid, and holding space for ideas to take shape. In that way, Beth and I began to weave a relationship built on trust, patience, and curiosity.

Weaving is also knowing what your gifts are and using them in service.

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Before we began our residency journey as weavers, YouthxYouth asked us to write down our gifts and how we could support our residency hosts through them. I have always known my gift is being a writer and a communicator, and in this context I added being a young person and a weaver. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what being a weaver meant within an organization, so I leaned on Beth to guide me.

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In addition to her expertise in operations, Beth brought the gift of connection. She wove me into the fabric of Big Change by introducing me to her colleagues and opening doors to projects that stretched me beyond my scope as a communications professional, including a scouting project that challenged me to think differently about how young people can drive more systemic change and how organizations can support them.

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It was through this process that I also encountered Big Change’s work on intergenerational collaboration. I came to understand it in theory, how organizations can intentionally bridge generations to share wisdom and energy, and in practice, by witnessing how Big Change partnered with young people and through my own collaboration with Beth.

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That is what weaving came to mean for me: the art of bringing gifts into service, across ages and experiences, to create something stronger together than we could ever achieve alone. That understanding gives me hope for a future shaped by collaboration, and it is a practice I will carry forward.

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But there can’t be weaving without fun. Some of my favorite moments with Beth were the ones filled with laughter, like when we wore Christmas sweaters and looked glamorous, ready to take a photo on Zoom, and then never did. Or when we decided to become “TripleBeths”: Beth B, Beth V (Beth Vaughan, Head of Communications at Big Change), and me, temporarily adopting the name just to join in the joke. Those playful moments reminded me that weaving is not only about trust and presence, but also about joy. They showed me that joy is not an after thought, but a thread in the fabric,  the strand that holds collaboration together and makes it deeply human.

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I can write endlessly about weavership, but some things cannot be fully understood through words alone, they must be felt. Since I was a small girl, I have loved writing, and later chose communications as a profession because I believe the world is connected through stories, and one of the most powerful arts is writing. Yet even as a writer, I know that weaving is more than language. The whole cannot be whole without the threads of others, and words alone cannot capture its true nature. Weaving must be experienced, lived, and practiced in order to make an impact. And that is the beauty of it.

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Notes:

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Image generated by GeminiAI

Words, all by humans

**the YxY Weavership Residency is for youth community organisers who are striving to transform education and other systems around young people

*What is weavership? (From: https://weavinglab.org/what-is-weaving/)

Weaving is the practice of interconnecting people, projects and places in synergistic and purposeful ways.

(From: https://www.youthxyouth.com/programs/weavership)

We weave social change with others because we know that we won’t get to the life-affirming world we seek by working on our own. We recognise that for transformation to take place,we need each other, and we need to recognise our interconnectedness with all of life as well as the interconnectedness of the issues we are dealing with.