Scaffolding Youth-led Social Change Work

Questions to ask ourselves and one another:

• What are the advantages/disadvantages of youth-led organizing?
• What does intergenerational partnership look like?
• How do you feel about letting go of your own power in the service of youth development?
• What gets in your way of letting youth lead?

Partnering with youth:

• Consider youth as experts on their own experience.
• Shift the premise—from adult-led to joint work; from fixing youth to fixing a problem.
• Share decision-making power.
• Be transparent, open and honest about challenges, obstacles, and communications.
• Be willing to advocate for youth; use your adult privilege to support the collective goals of the project.
• When necessary (and when asked) provide capacity building, training, and offer connections and information.
• Appreciate generational differences in communication styles, values, knowledge—engage difference and conflict with an open mind and open heart.
• Together, create and establish clear roles and responsibilities; hold one another accountable.
• Respect youth time and priorities; create a relationship in which it’s okay to say no.

None of us want to be “Dream Busters”. We can all learn to check ourselves and turn an impulse to admonish, reject, or protect into a possibility and opportunity for youth leadership.

“Let’s face it, we are undone by each other. And if we’re not we’re missing something,” claims philosopher and feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler in her book Precarious Lives. If we really listen and open ourselves to their insights and ideas, working with youth can be our undoing, an experience of unraveling, a letting go of the predictable. In this space we become open to new possibilities and, in the words of educator Maxine Greene, we can begin to imagine the world as if it could be otherwise.  

In her book, Powered By Girl, SPARK Movement co-founder Lyn Mikel Brown identifies 8 conditions necessary for effective intergenerational youth organizing:

Necessary Conditions for Effective Youth-Adult Partnerships

1. A feminist activist history that positions youth in time and place, that broadens and deepens and contextualizes the issues they struggle with in this present moment.
2. Genuine relationships; honest, transparent relationships where youth and adults together can interrogate power and privilege and dimensions of difference. They want adults who are real, or as Izzy, 16 and White says, “not fake.” Genuine relationships require negotiation and compromise, reflection, and deep feeling. They also require the courage to have hard conversations about systems of oppression and privilege, about intersectional dimensions of difference that make us who we are, that can both get in our way and open up creative possibilities.
3. Respect for girls’ knowledge, where adults see youth as experts on their own lives and respect what they bring to the work. It shifts everything, Celeste, Latinx, 19, says, when the women she and the girls she works with “know we know” and respect that we have “insights into oppression adults may not experience.”
4. Critical consciousness as a way of being, a way of relating, as well as a way of thinking; where together youth and adults take up feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty’s call to create “public cultures of dissent.” It’s this work of uncovering the taken for granted, examining what appears on the surface to be clear and certain, that Alice, White, 16, calls a “mind-blowing connecting the dots” experience… “You’re like, oh my god, and it just changes your world.”
5. Loyalty or honoring promises to listen, to stand with youth when things get difficult and the powers that be exert pressure to shut things down. Betrayal by adults is a much more common experience for youth and so, as adults, we are obligated to reflect on and make transparent our hidden loyalties to norms, institutional expectations, and powerful others.
6. Supportive coalitions where girls from different backgrounds and experiences experience the power of working together, in solidarity, for a common cause. Coalitions are both supportive homes and places to challenge one another, do difference and resist a lapse into niceness and sameness.
7. Intergenerational partnerships require adults to imagine sharing power with youth and then to prove trustworthiness, the ability to listen, a commitment to supporting the most persuasive arguments and not just the ones we want or agree with. They require us to remain open when, as Montgomery, 20, African-American says, girls “call us on our BS.”
8. Adult support of many kinds. Using adult power and support strategically in the service of youth means offering what we have access to–space, resources, transportation, networking/connections, financial support, and also sharing all the ways we’ve learned to negotiate the culture of power.

Adapted from Powered By Girl by Lyn Mikel Brown (2016, Beacon Press)

It’s important to think about how youth participate in the work with adults. Sociologist Roger Hart wrote a book called Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care for UNICEF in 1997. The “Ladder of Youth Participation” is a super valuable tool from the book.

Here’s Freechild’s version:

Ladder rungs 1-3 are considered nonparticipation or examples of adultism because of the ways youth are used for adult ends. Adam Fletcher, founder of the FreeChild Project, offers examples of nonparticipation in his blog, “51 Ways Student Tokenism Happens.”

In addition to Freechild, here are some other sites with resources we love: