Imagine a society where understanding, empathy, and cooperation between generations breathe life into our communities. This initiative is more than a consultation; it's a journey into possible futures shaped by inspiring tales of collaboration and solidarity. Become the narrator and tell us about new, possible experiences of living in an intergenerationally fair world. Your stories will motivate others to build a lasting legacy for those who will follow.
Collective Visioning: Why Your Stories Matter
By sharing the emotions, thoughts, and actions involved in the experience of intergenerational fairness, your story can transform these experiences from mere imagination into reality. You'll demonstrate the importance of thinking beyond our own self-interested circles and lifetimes, inspiring others, including us at the European Commission, to take meaningful action.
We will be responsive to your stories and make use of them. By highlighting diverse experiences and insights, they will guide the development of policies and initiatives aimed at fostering stronger bonds between generations and a fairer future for all, including those not yet born.
Coalition teams, comprising people from both within and outside the European Commission, are also working together to explore what a fair intergenerational future could look like across the key areas identified in the scoping phase. Their stories, along with yours and those gathered from other workshops, will be brought together at the end of June to help shape a shared vision for the future. This will be done with the help of professional writers, and we’ll make sure to put great inspirational stories you shared in the spotlight!
Build on the Scoping Results, Consult the Storytelling Guidelines, and Find Inspiration in Our Examples of Vision Snapshots!
To ensure your vision shapes the strategy, we invite you to use the summary of the results from the scoping phase as a starting point. By doing so, you can imagine intergenerationally fair futures where some of the key issues identified are addressed. For example:
- A society that prioritizes long-term thinking by integrating future generations into decision-making processes.
- A governance system that truly represents the needs of all, actively involving young and elderly voices to foster a more inclusive democracy and social cohesion.
- A future where intergenerational collaboration tackles climate change and environmental degradation, securing a sustainable planet for all.
- A world in which intergenerational solidarity creates a more equitable society, ensuring social cohesion and access to essential services like education, healthcare, and digital technology for every age group.
These are just some of the many possible stories you can build by focusing on the root causes and areas for action identified in the scoping phase.
Feel free to consult our storytelling guidelines to bring your visions to life. They suggest techniques like the Hero's Journey to illustrate transformation and collaboration, inspiring you to envision a future where all generations thrive together.
Last but not least, to spark your imagination and find inspiration, consider the following examples. These are vision snapshots written by the Blue Book Trainees of the European Commission, who envisioned for us how intergenerationally fair futures may look like:
At the Civic Forum, I sit beside my grandmother. We’re reviewing the latest climate adaptation plans, co-designed by citizens of all ages. The decisions aren’t easy, but they’re transparent and rooted in the best available knowledge. That’s our foundation. She remembers a time when the future was something to control with top-down strategies tried to lock it in. But today, we treat it more like a shared horizon, shaped by evidence, memory, and care. We accept uncertainty, but we don’t ignore it. We shape flexible strategies together.
Before any major decision, we hold Nature Consultations. Scientists, artists, citizens, young and old, come together to interpret signals from ecosystems as part of our democratic process. We ask: What’s right for those who come after us? What does the living world need to thrive? We treat our natural environment as a partner to work with, not a landscape to dominate.
Gran says our institutions have changed. We govern now through a balance of voice and structure, assemblies, local initiatives, and accountable institutions working in concert. Fairness doesn’t stop at income or identity. The carbon budget is shared between generations. Digital access is a common right. And care flows through age-inclusive systems. Technology is not worshipped. Every major innovation is reviewed by intergenerational panels. We’ve learned that caution is not resistance, it’s a form of respect.
The European Union I’m part of is a strong, cooperative voice, but clear about its values, building agreements that last while not shying away from disagreement when equity, climate, or peace are at stake. The future used to feel distant. Now, I see it in every decision we make.
I grew up in a community that keeps its plans taped to the fridge: renewable-energy targets, citizens’ budgets, dashboards glowing with progress bars. We hold monthly assemblies where every voice is counted; no seat at the back, no velvet ropes. Gran tells me her parents fought to replace the old top-down council with these circles of shared agency; she still carries the worn ledger where the first co-operative dividend was recorded. When I run my fingers over that faded ink I feel the pulse of responsibility.
Fairness, to us, is more than nostalgia; it is optimisation. Ambiguity makes us restless, so we plot future scenarios, run simulations, and share the code. We map soil quality before planting community orchards, stress-test pension reforms, and calibrate carbon offsets so our grandchildren inherit not deficits but dividends. Yet the spreadsheets never let me forget the human margin of error. I watch Zion, seven, interrogating the air-quality sensor on his wrist, and I promise myself that the future we script must leave room for his questions.
So tonight, I tweak the model once more, factoring curiosity as a variable, proving that stewardship and innovation can share the same cell.
We encourage you to engage by commenting on these stories with your own ideas or by contributing a snapshot story of your own. Your story can take any form you like, as long as it reflects your vision of an intergenerationally fair future and stays within 1,000 characters. If you’d also like to share them online, please add #OurFutures to them.
Next Phases: Strategy Ideas and Co-Creation
These collective visions will be the starting point for our next phase in the process, ‘Strategy ideas’ (September – October), where we’ll think about the concrete actions we must undertake to realise the visions we collectively built and shared.
Suggestions & OurFutures Platform
If you have any ideas or suggestions to improve our process, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us at JRC-INTERGENERATIONAL-FAIRNESS
ec [dot] europa [dot] eu (JRC-INTERGENERATIONAL-FAIRNESS[at]ec[dot]europa[dot]eu).
Perhaps you have additional ideas about what a desirable future for Europe could look like, beyond the lens of intergenerational fairness. If so, we invite you to share your vision on the OurFutures platform. These stories are regularly reviewed and analysed to help inform policymakers about what matters most to citizens and what should be prioritised on the policy agenda.
Join us in this exciting journey to create a fairer future for all generations. Your voice matters, and together, we can build a legacy that benefits everyone.