It all started when a dynamic Brazilian business executive connected with the former President of the world’s largest student run organisation and the CEO of Celemi, a Swedish provider of learning solutions. The impetus for their first meeting was an observation that young people were losing their idealism and finding insufficient channels for their creativity as they entered working life. Together, they agreed to create a network that would support young visionaries to become a creative asset to organisations and society at large.

This team of three began hosting conversations in 1998 – starting with two small, international meetings (in São Paulo, Brazil and Kungshamn, Sweden). Attending these exploratory meetings were young people from all the world’s continents, who were embarking upon working life, and who felt a sense of urgency and idealism around improving this world. They wanted working life to be a vehicle for creative expression and social impact, but they understood that organisations and individuals would need to do much, much better for this to become reality.

Many of these young people had been active in student organisations, where they had realised the power of combining their creativity, determination and clear vision. Upon entering work, they saw friends with similar capabilities conforming to existing norms of the workplace, accepting invitations to join the inevitable "real world", and deciding that making a difference would have to come later - or on the side. Even with friends who joined organisations with a social purpose this common experience was voiced and shared: an experience of wanting to contribute to a purpose higher than self, yet facing internal and external systemic constraints in trying to do so, and of, in day to day strivings, feeling pressured to compromise personal values and beliefs.

The idea of Pioneers of Change truly came to life when a group of 25 young people from around the world met in Mexico in the end of January 1999 for a launching meeting of the network, and three global facilitators started working full-time.

Over the years, we have become increasingly aware of the patterns and structures behind the challenges we meet in trying to create opportunities for ourselves and others to channel our creative contributions. We have grown from a support network into a learning community in which we come together to sharpen our skills and abilities. We have started to work constructively and consciously with creating new (or supporting old) practices and ethics that are more life-affirming than the current systems. We have understood how much it demands of us to learn to diagnose the root causes of problems and to work at that level. We have learned what it means to really look at the world differently, to perceive the paradoxes around us, while at the same time perceiving the possibilities behind the real.

We have realised that the story is just beginning.