Hey everyone, I'm Nia – the new intern with Solutions Not Sides (SNS), and I'm here to tell you all about my first full day as the newest member of the team (does that make me sound like the office puppy or something?). If you had asked me when I first came across Solutions Not Sides at age 16-ish, if I thought I would ever come back into contact with the company on this level, I would’ve said probably not. But here I am as an intern for the year, having completed my first day and now I'm here to sit down and slow down my thoughts enough to make them legible for all of you.

If there is one thing, I am a big believer in, it is that if we want to be hopeful about conflict settings being resolved, then we have to open up the table, to those from the region, to those with the religious backgrounds, to those with an interest and/or experience, to those who will be the future politicians and diplomats, it has to be open. And open can’t mean the half-hearted ‘open’ that leaves eggshells and unspoken words, it has to be the sort of open where we open our minds and realise that as a student said ‘opinion is shaped by experience so be gentle when debating the opinions of others.’ I myself am the same age as many of these attendees so I can’t refer to them as the younger generation, but I feel a sense of pride in seeing my fellow gen-z-ers taking ownership of opinions from across a spectrum of beliefs and experiences and being able to acknowledge that we don’t have to agree but we do have to respect. Westminster could possibly learn something from these attendees who made it very clear from the get-go that differences in opinion are fine but slinging insults is not.

Conflict afflicted settings have always been significant to me, which is part of what led me towards interning here, in less than a few hours here, I know I made the correct decision for me. The work SNS does, is something I fully support by opening the table far and wide, bringing speakers over from the region, bringing people with religious background from the afflicted settings, and bringing in the future politicians and diplomats to discuss in a safe space, it is a step towards a world that I want to see. Today is what I hoped it would be, a taster into SNS ahead of the next nine months, and a glimpse into what the minds of my fellow gen-z are thinking on the topic of conflicts that generations of activists, politicians and more have been unable to resolve (yet – I say yet, because I don’t believe it is impossible but I am enough of a realist to recognise that we have to take bigger steps to make progress in the near future).

For me at least, I find that gen-z are often overlooked to the point of being ignored, for their analytical ability and are too quickly labelled the ‘snowflake’ generation, it’s one of those things that both reiterates the significance of this programme but also demonstrates that if programmes like this are required to get younger voices into the conversation with a platform, as a society – we still have a long way to go. Probably should’ve said at the start, I'm a sociology student unless it wasn’t already obvious ☺