Franziska Seel

Franziska Seel is the Executive Director of Global Youth Action Network (GYAN)

"She also serves as Associate Director of TakingITGlobal (TIG), which runs the world’s premier online community for young people interested in making a chance. TIG and GYAN share a similar vision of connecting, empowering and supporting young people, and are currently in the process of moving their 6-year old partnership into a more strategic alliance to elevate the impact of their work...

"In 2001, Franziska was appointed delegate of the German National Youth Council to the 4th UN World Youth Forum in Dakar, Senegal. At the conference, she was introduced for the first time to the work of global youth organizations such as GYAN, TIG and the Youth Employment Summit campaign. In the years following the Youth Forum, she became involved with a number of projects and organizations: she undertook research on youth and peace as part of the IPRA Youth Commission, served as project coordinator for the Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) in Germany, coordinated the German National Information Society Youth Campaign, and was an active member of the Youth Caucus to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

"In 2005, Franziska worked for TakingITGlobal at their headquarters in Toronto as the organizations’ MDG Program Manager, responsible for implementing a partnership with the United Nations Millennium Campaign and leading a team of regional youth editors around the word along with coordinating TakingITGlobal’s MDG portal http://mdg.takingitglobal.org. Following this work she was a consultant to the United Nations Millennium Campaign and a member of the GCAP Children and Youth Task Force Steering Committee. Most recently she supported D-Code in conducting research commissioned by the World Association of Newspapers on youth media consumption in 10 countries around the world.

"Franziska holds an M.A. in Sociology, Political Science and Chinese Studies. Her master thesis focused on analyzing the causes of youth unemployment in OECD countries."