Friday, April 24, 2026
9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. EDT
Location: Copley Hall Copley Formal Lounge
Over the past 25 years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) played a significant role in shaping global approaches to youth development and youth engagement in international development. As the global landscape changes, this event will consider how lessons learned can inform the future, including efforts to ensure young people are meaningfully engaged as partners in policy and practice.
This interactive event will also inform and contribute to an upcoming report on “Engaging Young People As Partners in Policy and Practice: Lessons from 25 Years of Global Youth Development and the Path Forward.” The report will document the evolution of the U.S. government's foreign assistance approach to youth in development and youth engagement between 2000 and 2025. Report findings draw on key public policies, projects, funding data, and strategic models, as well as interviews and focus groups with USAID staff, partners, researchers, advocates, and young people who contributed to the agency’s impact over the past two decades. The report will also look forward, capturing key lessons and recommendations from USAID’s experience as the development community charts a new path forward.
The event will bring together former U.S. government staff, current funders, practitioners, researchers, students, and other community members to reflect on the path forward for youth engagement. Participants will hear early insights and recommendations from the draft report, engage in interactive discussions, and build connections through informal dialogue and networking.
This event is in-person only and will not be livestreamed.
Schedule
9:00 a.m. - 9:20 a.m. | Event Opening and Welcome
9:20 a.m. - 9:40 a.m. | Looking Back: Draft Report Presentation
9:40 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. | Looking Forward: Fireside Chats
10:45 a.m. - 11:20 a.m. | World Café Community Conversations
11:20 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | Synthesis and Closing
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m. | Networking Reception
Participants
Gillian Huebner
Gillian Huebner is the executive director of the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues at Georgetown University. A global child rights and protection specialist, Huebner's work focuses on supporting the development, strengthening, and coordination of programs and systems to enhance community-based and nationally owned approaches to building young people’s well-being, particularly in times of crisis. She co-founded the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues with Dr. Joan Lombardi in 2021.
Sarah Sladen
Sarah Sladen is a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues, where she is leading a focus on global youth development in a changing landscape of foreign assistance, funding, and partnerships. Her areas of expertise include positive youth development (PYD), youth engagement and leadership, economic inclusion and mobility, and sports-based youth development (SBYD). She previously served as the former agency senior youth advisor at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Mike McCabe (SFS’87)
Mike McCabe (SFS’87) is a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children's Issues. His areas of expertise include positive youth development (PYD), youth leadership and collective action, learning to earning pathways, STEM education, and volunteer service. He has over 30 years of experience working in international development across 50 countries, including as an agency leader on youth development at USAID and a presidential appointee/regional director at Peace Corps.
Cait Dallaire
Cait Dallaire is a senior fellow at New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and is a producer/host of The Public Service Project podcast, where she sits down with current and former public servants to reflect on their origin stories, capture lessons learned, and think broadly about what service means today. She is a former foreign affairs officer at the U.S. Department of State, where she co-led youth, peace, and security (YPS) initiatives and drafted the State Department’s first bureau-level strategic plan for YPS implementation.
Chris Milligan
Chris Milligan is a retired senior foreign service officer with more than 30 years at USAID advancing U.S. development and humanitarian goals, particularly in crisis and political transition settings. Over the course of his career, he led major initiatives that strengthened the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance and advanced American foreign policy priorities. He served as counselor to USAID (2018–2021), mission director in Madagascar and Burma, and held several senior policy and leadership roles.
Alejandro Feferbaum
Alejandro Feferbaum is a children and youth specialist with 12 years of experience in international development, with a track record in youth development, child well-being, workforce development, and community resilience in Colombia. He supported USAID’s $50 million youth resilience activity for nearly four years, contributing to an initiative that reached more than 40,000 families and strengthened protective environments and opportunities for young people in high-risk communities.
Rachel Surkin
As a senior non-profit leader, Rachel Surkin spent over 20 years advancing the international youth development sector. Most recently at IREX, she co-designed and co-led the USAID-funded Youth Excel—a $30M USAID flagship initiative operating in 28 countries with more than 110 youth-led partners leading their own research to strengthen their outcomes and local policy. She founded and built IREX's youth practice, which ultimately grew to a $100m+ portfolio, and elevated positive youth development, cross-sectoral youth programming, locally led youth development, and inclusive youth engagement models across the globe.
Abolaji Omitogun
Abolaji Omitogun is a media-tech entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of youth development, community programming, and local news innovation. His journey began as a youth atlas corps fellow (2019–2020) at Making Cents International in Washington, D.C., where he supported the USAID-funded YouthLead initiative, managing digital platforms, content, and global engagement for a community of young changemakers worldwide. Today, he also helps steward GDYL (Global Development Youth Leaders), a Facebook-based community of almost 100,000 young professionals advancing global development goals.
Neetha Tangirala
Neetha Tangirala has more than 15 years of experience managing programs that advance youth engagement, civic participation, and democratic governance across the government, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. She has supported global youth civic initiatives such as Generation Democracy and the Young African Leaders Initiative and has held roles at USAID, Amnesty International, National Endowment for Democracy, and IREX. She currently manages the Protect Dissent Network under the Right to Protest Program at the Proteus Fund.
Corey Oser
As senior vice president of programs, Corey Oser leads Global Fund for Children’s grantmaking and capacity-strengthening efforts with child and youth-centered organizations globally. Her interest in fostering community wellbeing and human development stems from more than 20 years with community-based and international NGOs working to advance rights and opportunities. Oser is the host of the Roots and Sparks podcast, a platform for global changemakers to tell their stories. She serves as the co-chair of the Wellbeing Project’s Funders and Wellbeing Learning Group.
Daryna Oshenko
Daryna Onyshko is a Ukrainian democracy development expert and practitioner with nearly a decade of hands-on experience advancing political engagement. She currently serves as manager of the Youth Democracy Network (YDN), a nonpartisan global network that equips emerging leaders from over 80 countries across policy, media, academia, and entrepreneurship with the tools, knowledge, and connections. Previously, Onyshko worked with the National Democratic Institute in Central Europe and at Ukraine’s Consulate in Poland. An experienced international speaker, Onyshko is the former elected president of the European Democracy Youth Network.
Marco Fayet
As manager of the World Bank Group Youth Summit, Marco Fayet supports day-to-day operations and oversees global strategy. Fayet is also a knowledge management lead at the World Bank's Development Impact Group, where he translates research findings into actionable insights for policymakers and development practitioners. Fayet's multifaceted career spans various quantitative and creative roles across international organizations, consulting firms, start-ups, and academia.
Sherry Youssef
Sherry Youssef is a senior international development expert with over 30 years of experience leading complex, multi-stakeholder programs. She specializes in private sector engagement, public–private partnerships, workforce development, labor markets, competitiveness, youth development, and women’s economic empowerment. Youssef has managed large, multi-donor initiatives with partners including the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Global Affairs Canada, the Islamic Development Bank, and the World Bank Group, as well as Fortune 500 companies such as ExxonMobil and GE. Currently, she serves as senior director of economic resilience at FHI 360.
Aly Rahim
Aly Rahim heads CIVIC: The Civil Society and Social Innovation Alliance and serves as global lead for citizen engagement at the World Bank. He leads the Bank’s global agenda on civic and citizen engagement and operational partnerships with civil society, focusing on how citizen voice, transparency, and accountability can be embedded into public policy, large-scale investments, and service delivery to improve development outcomes. Rahim's career spans leadership across development finance, fragile, and conflict-affected settings, and global policy. He has also served as a Canadian foreign service officer, working on stabilization and reconstruction policy in Afghanistan and Sudan.
Saji Prelis
Saji Prelis is co-chair of the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security; director of Children & Youth Programs at Search for Common Ground (SFCG); and a senior fellow with the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues. With over 25 years of experience, Prelis has been a leading figure in youth movements within conflict and transition environments across more than 35 countries.
Accessibility
Accommodation requests should be sent to globalchildren@georgetown.edu by April 17. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.