We are excited to share that our CEO/Founder, Cat Davison, has been selected for the Youth for Peace: UNESCO Intercultural Leadership Programme.
This new UNESCO initiative, implemented with the generous support of Kingold Group, aims to equip participants with the skills, knowledge, and resources to champion intercultural dialogue as a strategy to address pressing global challenges.
In its first year, the Programme will focus on the theme: “Learning to Collaborate for a Shared Future: Using Dialogue to Foster Social Cohesion in a World on the Move.”
The Youth for Peace fellows will become part of a dynamic, international network of young leaders and changemakers, gaining the opportunity to champion intercultural dialogue and drive meaningful impact in their communities.
A total of 50 professionals with diverse backgrounds and experiences were selected from 8,250 applications across the world, including politicians, educators, authors, artists, business leaders and social entrepreneurs.
The selected fellows will engage in a structured capacity building programme that includes online training workshops, peer-peer learning and coaching, also equipped with a grant to lead a high impact project.
As part of the process, Cat pitched working with the EduSpots network towards the redevelopment of EduSpots’ online courses, which promote global understanding through critical dialogue, with their innovative design contributing to EduSpots winning the 2018 International Award winner, sponsored by the British Council.
Through expanding a range of interactive online courses that bring students from across the world together to critically and empathetically explore themes relating to global ethics, we hope to advance inter-cultural understanding whilst raising funds for EduSpots’ work promoting future-ready education through community ownership in Ghana and Kenya.
As part of the fellowship, Cat will attend and present at the 2025 Global Youth Dialogue for Peace in Guangzhou, China, April 2026, which will bring together many different perspectives on what intercultural dialogue looks like in practice.
This is ahead of joining a new Global Alumni Network with UNESCO-led opportunities for learning, advocacy, and collaboration which she will aim to share widely across the EduSpots’ staff team and network.
What is intercultural leadership?
According to the UNESCO Youth for peace team, intercultural leadership is:
“… the strategic capacity to lead across cultural and social differences, harnessing diverse perspectives, experiences, and values to foster cooperation, build trust, and drive practical solutions to shared challenges. Unlike traditional paradigms of leadership, which often assume a common cultural framework, intercultural leadership enables leaders to navigate complexity and mobilize diverse groups where no single belief, experience, or worldview prevails. In today’s interconnected world, this ability to turn diversity into an asset for stability, resilience, and innovation is essential for effective leadership.”
Cat is looking forward to considering what this means in practice by learning from 49 other fellows in diverse local contexts.
Cat’s Intercultural Leadership Journey
Cat’s interest in intercultural leadership began as a world-weary 14 year old growing up in London during the “war on terror”. As a response, she wrote a 20,000 book entitled ‘A World of No Fear” calling for global leaders and everyday citizens to reimagine our collective global futures, a book she abandoned due to her realisation of her powerlessness and the importance of raising young voices caught within conflict, over her own.
Cat recognised her need to better understand human behaviour and global politics leading her into a passion for ethics and critical debate that took her to study Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, an interest she continued to explore with students in 11 years of classroom teaching of philosophy, ethics and religious studies.
As a teacher and later senior leader, she worked with thousands of students in critical debates and community action projects, creating student-led co-curricular clubs for Amnesty International, Global Development and Charitable Ethics, alongside developing and strengthening partnerships with local Syrian and Ukrainian communities.
She worked with inspiring students and colleagues to lead school and community-wide weeks, curriculums and conferences across refugee education, environmental justice and anti-racism, also collaboratively growing a nationwide teacher-led community action network with a focus on deepening students’ critical awareness of the complexities of igniting truly sustainable and equitable changes that mattered to them.
Parallel to this UK-based journey, recognising the potential for promoting future ready education through community-driven change and a peer-peer grassroots network, she worked with a group of teachers and students in Ghana and the UK to set up the EduSpots network. Since 2015, over 50 local teams have designed, created and led community-owned education spaces named ‘Spots’ promoting future-ready education.
Recognising her need to engage at a deeper level, Cat enrolled on a part-time MA in Education and International Development at University College London’s Institute of Education, with interactive modules on Education, Conflict and Peacebuilding, Development Education and Global Citizenship Education building understanding through peer-peer learning and participatory research, with her dissertation exploring the unintended divisive consequences of community literacy programmes through a postcolonial lens.
Cat’s journey working collaboratively to promote active, critical and empathetic global citizenship education through participatory methods led her to be selected as one of two UK finalists for the UNESCO-backed Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize in 2021, an opportunity the EduSpots team have used to continue to further champion educational equity and intercultural dialogue through EduSpots’ dynamic network of local changemakers.
We wish Cat well as she begins this exciting new journey next week, engaging in a range of lectures, workshops and coaching sessions with the UNESCO Youth for Peace team.