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UNICEF YuWaah India - Young People's Action Team (YPAT)
Young People's Action Team (YPAT)
Client
UNICEF YuWaah India
Engagement
Ongoing
Programmes
YPAT + Yutopia
Scope
Strategy, Campaigns, Capacity Building
The Problem
India has 371 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29. That is the largest youth population in the world. And yet young people are mostly absent from the rooms where decisions about their lives are made. Policy tables. Hiring panels. CSR committees. Boardrooms.
UNICEF YuWaah developed Youth Centrality as a framework to close that gap. Nine principles that describe what it actually looks like when an institution treats young people as equal stakeholders rather than as beneficiaries.
The framework existed. The institutional relationships existed. What was missing was the public momentum: the campaigns, the brand, the partner conversations, the platforms. Institutions outside the development sector had never encountered Youth Centrality. The fellows inside the programme had not yet learned how to advocate for it publicly. And nothing tied any of it together as a single story.
VIVA was brought in to build that story, and the communications infrastructure that holds it.
YPAT: Building Advocates from Within
Youth Centrality needs people who can speak for it. YPAT is the fellowship where YuWaah develops those people. It runs across a full year, bringing young people from across India through two residential workshops, a series of virtual sessions, peer learning, and active participation in YuWaah's public platforms.
VIVA's role in YPAT covers three areas: building the fellows' communications capability, putting them at the centre of YuWaah's campaigns, and holding the cohort together across the year.
Theme 1: Capacity Building
Residencies and Virtual Sessions
VIVA led and delivered the YPAT capacity building track from the start of the 2025-26 cohort, with support from the YuWaah team. We ran both residential workshops and a series of virtual sessions across the year, shaping what each session would cover and how each one built on the last.
Each session was designed around a specific communications skill that fellows would need for their advocacy.
Sessions Delivered
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Intersectionality: how to think about and speak to the layered identities of the communities fellows work with.
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Strategic Communications for Community Engagement: how to build messages that actually move institutions.
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Public Speaking (Session 8): how to hold a room and a digital platform.
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Prepping to Graduate, The Last Leg: turning a year of work into a clear public position before graduation.
Theme 2:
Campaigns and Public Platforms
YuWaah Campaigns Activated Through YPATs
YPAT fellows are not just inside the programme. They are out in the world too, showing up across YuWaah's campaign calendar as public voices for Youth Centrality. VIVA developed the strategy and produced the content for several of these campaigns.
Letters from a Young Person: Writing the Future, Together
A three-part National Youth Day campaign that ran in January 2026. Each part featured handwritten letters from YPAT fellows addressed to India's institutions, written in English and Hindi, in the fellows' own handwriting. The letters covered what genuine partnership with young people should look like, from intersectional leadership to climate work to rural advocacy. Each carousel ended with a question that invited institutions to write back. The campaign ran on YuWaah's LinkedIn and Instagram with the hashtag #WritingTheFutureTogether.
Earth Day and World Environment Day
VIVA developed and ran a YPAT-led video and image campaign for Earth Day and World Environment Day across April to June 2026. We briefed fellows, produced and edited the videos, and managed publishing across YuWaah's channels. Three fellow-led video films anchored the campaign, each featuring a YPAT fellow speaking about their environmental work in their own context.
Other YuWaah Campaigns and Platforms
Across the year, VIVA also supported the communications around YPAT fellows' participation in YuWaah's broader public platform calendar.
PLATFORMS AND EVENTS
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AI Summit: fellows participated as Youth Delegates with VIVA-supported communications.
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Women's Day: fellow-led content and amplification.
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International Volunteering Year and Volunteering Week: campaign content and fellow participation.
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Mental Health Week: campaign content with fellows as voices.
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Climate Week Mumbai: fellow representation and content support.
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The Leaders Council by UNICEF YuWaah
Theme 3:
Cohort Engagement
Keeping a Distributed Cohort Together
YPAT fellows live across India. They join virtual sessions from very different contexts, and the risk of any cohort spread out like this is that people slowly fall away. Building the engagement system that prevents that was its own piece of work.
VIVA built a layered approach. One-to-one support for fellows at risk of not completing the programme, and a regular communication cadence across the year to keep the cohort active and invested all the way through to graduation.
Theme 4:
Public Facing Output
Amplifying Fellow Voices
VIVA worked with YPAT fellows of the Yutopia Youth Advisory Group to develop LinkedIn articles authored by them, on topics ranging from co-creation in development to youth-led policy advocacy. We edited the articles and coordinated publishing on the fellows' own LinkedIn channels, so that Youth Centrality reached the fellows' professional networks in their own voice.
YPAT Graduation (12-13 June 2026)
VIVA ran the communications for the 2025-26 YPAT graduation, held across two days on 12 and 13 June. 29 fellows graduated from the cohort.
The two days were designed as a closing of one chapter and an opening of the next. Activities included a leadership town hall, a meet and greet with UNICEF leadership, felicitation of the graduating fellows, and structured reflection sessions. One of the most meaningful pieces was a collective letter that the entire graduating cohort wrote together, addressed to the incoming 2026-27 batch. The letter passed on what they had learned and what they wanted the next group to carry forward. The format echoed the Letters from a Young Person campaign, this time turned inward, cohort to cohort.
VIVA owned the agenda design, all collateral, and the post-event communications that documented the graduation for YuWaah's channels.
Impact
Holding a year-long fellowship together for a geographically dispersed group of young people is genuinely hard. So is converting their internal programme work into public advocacy that travels. 29 fellows completed the 2025-26 cohort. VIVA built the systems that held the year together and gave it a public voice.