A Trust Bridge For The Next Generation
Updated: 4 days ago
At Salvator Mundi Café No. 5, experienced leaders asked what their generation had failed to see, and what they could now offer young people through mentorship, shared knowledge and real participation.
A Hand To Hold
The question was uncomfortable by design. What did your generation get wrong, and what do you still believe in? At the Salvator Mundi Café on 20 September 2026, the panel was asked to look back before it offered advice to anyone coming next.
Mario Diel opened the session, and Sally Benbasat moderated a conversation that moved from loneliness and uncertainty to practical commitments. Young participants brought concerns about inequality, conflict and the future. The older generation was asked to respond with more than reassurance.
By the end, Björn Söderberg had given the discussion its clearest image: a trust bridge. Sometimes, he said, the world is so complex that people need a hand to hold before they dare to cross. The challenge for Salvator Mundi Global was to make that hand available.
When Progress Outruns Its Foundations
Angelika Berger-Sodian drew on a career in automotive and mobility. For her, the problem was not that technology had stopped offering opportunities. It was that the structures around it had changed too slowly. Education, leadership development and the wider ecosystem had not kept pace with technological transformation.
She resisted describing the industry's transformation only as a crisis. How people looked at change mattered. But recognising opportunity was not enough when the support systems needed to help young people enter it were missing.
Her starting point was personal: find something you care about. Passion had helped sustain her through difficult periods in her own career. Her commitment was to help young people develop the inspiration, skills and confidence to become leaders who could shape their industry and the world around them.
Söderberg approached the question through the assumptions of his own upbringing. The world had once seemed divided into clear blocs, and government had appeared capable of solving its problems. Experience had made that picture less certain. He urged humility about a world in which everything is connected and the truth looks different from different levels.
What he still believed in was human potential, including the ability to understand ourselves and other people. That was something people could continue developing every day. Mentorship, in that account, was less about supplying a fixed answer than helping someone learn to see more clearly.
The Security We Took For Granted
Mary Arnal brought the perspective of an educator working with young people. She recalled university grants, housing and the expectation of a job lasting through a working life. Those advantages had formed a security bubble, even though her own childhood in Northern Ireland had also included conflict.
The next generation could not assume the same path. Housing and education had become much harder to afford, while technological change had moved faster than many had expected. Arnal's criticism of her generation was that it had not planned adequately for those changes.
Her work also showed her a problem that could not be solved simply by improving a curriculum. Before helping students with their educational futures, she often had to address anxiety, loneliness and isolation. Confidence and resilience were part of the preparation young people needed.
She argued for exchange rather than a one-way lesson. Older people could share their experience, while young people could share their worries and problems. The aim was to combine the wisdom of one generation with the technological awareness of another.
Ferda Kert questioned another set of promises: that education would create social mobility, technology would democratise opportunity, globalisation would spread prosperity, and merit would allow talent to rise. Progress had been real, he said, but access had not expanded as expected.
His optimism rested with a generation born into the AI era. Helping it meant questioning familiar institutions and assumptions, rather than asking young people to fit into structures that no longer served them well. He wanted to pass on experience, judgment, relationships and lessons from mistakes, without passing on the limitations that had accompanied them.
From Good Intentions To Commitments
The conversation became more concrete when the panel was asked what it would actually offer. Arnal proposed bringing peer groups together, allowing dialogue between young people, entrepreneurs and business leaders. Such relationships could help build self-esteem and support the search for a vocation.
Söderberg offered to mentor three young people or three young companies over three months, helping them take their next steps. The offer gave the wider discussion a practical scale: a person, a relationship and a period of sustained attention.
Mario described mentorship as a long-term human relationship. A mentor could help with business, but also with decisions in life. His own experience of wanting someone to recognise his potential had shaped his wish to become that person for others.
The group's reach, he argued, also had to extend beyond a handful of individual relationships. Salvator Mundi Global brought together people with different cultures, nationalities and experience. Their shared knowledge could support a wider community if it was made accessible.
Sally offered to speak at universities about entrepreneurship without charging, including the failures behind his own experience. The point was to give young people something more useful than a polished account of success. A discussion about leadership could also be a discussion about mistakes and the lessons they leave.
Access Matters As Much As Advice
Questions from Michal Zeevi-Bender brought the conversation back to how mentorship would work. How could young people actually reach the people offering it? A promise of support means little if the route to a mentor remains closed.
Mario described an SMG Next Generation WhatsApp channel as a starting point for sharing information. He also outlined a planned community with room for exchanges between young people and mentors, including country and subject groups. These were steps under development, not a finished mentoring system.
Dr. Otaviano Canuto supported collective mentoring while raising a further question: what would the mentors tell young people to do? The value of bringing people together had to be matched by thought about the guidance being offered.
İlke Toklu described her experience of mentoring university students and the gap between generations that social media did not automatically close. She called for more visible role models and for experienced people to meet young people where they were. Understanding their circumstances mattered more than assuming their lives resembled those of earlier generations.
A Community Beyond The Screen
Arnal proposed a summer school or camp where young people could meet face to face, form friendships and debate together with mentors. Online meetings could connect people across borders, but they did not replace every kind of relationship. Sally welcomed the idea as a possible SMG project to develop.
Kert offered a complementary proposal: mentoring interviews and a judgment library. A shared knowledge base could make the experience of SMG members available to more young people. His concern was that AI might make intelligence more accessible without making power equally accessible. Judgment and trust could become the things most in short supply.
Zeevi-Bender added a structural suggestion at the close: include at least one Next Generation member in each SMG committee or roundtable. Young people should contribute their perspective to the discussions themselves. Participation would then be part of the organisation's work, rather than something offered only after decisions had been made.
None of these proposals removed the uncertainty described at the start. They did, however, give the conversation a direction. Personal mentoring, peer groups, shared knowledge and a place in decision-making were ways to turn experience into access.
Söderberg's trust bridge brought those ideas together. It did not ask the next generation to copy the last. It offered support for the crossing, with enough confidence to move forward and enough freedom to choose what came next.
Around The Table
The discussion included Mario Diel, Sally Benbasat, Angelika Berger-Sodian, Björn Söderberg, Mary Arnal, Ferda Kert, Dr. Otaviano Canuto, İlke Toklu and Michal Zeevi-Bender, alongside members and young participants joining the Café.
About the Author
Shlomi Selim “Sally” Benbasat
Editor in Chief, Salvator Mundi Times
Serial entrepreneur and investor in B2B e-commerce, carbon markets and emissions reduction, chemicals and raw materials trading, EPC, technology, telecommunications, digital media and real estate, with ventures built and exited across Europe, LATAM, the Middle East and Asia.
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