Practical Tips for Engaging Youth as Speakers at Your Event

Updated September 22, 2022

As a professional in youth development and justice, I’ve attended many conferences, meetings, and trainings where young people speak. Sometimes, how adults involve youth is downright cringe-worthy. Other times, it puts the young person in danger. 

I know that most, if not all, of the adults who seek to engage youth as speakers do so with good intent. But good intentions are not enough. Even when youth are not equipped to advocate for themselves in these situations, as they sometimes aren’t, adults bear responsibility to practice these basics.

Here are my practical steps adults should take to do more than “check the box” of youth voice and make it a safe, meaningful experience for adult and youth participants.

101-level best practices

• Avoid asking youth with juvenile records to share their charges or specifics of their offenses in public settings. 

You risk negating the protections of confidentiality central to juvenile records. 

• Value the experience of the young person AND what their experience taught them about policy or practice decisions. 

Youth are experts in their lives with the capacity to apply that expertise to systems change. You would never restrict a PhD to sharing their dissertation research, so why would you keep a young person from applying what they learned to your questions?

• Don’t “put youth on the spot” with questions you haven’t vetted with them beforehand. 

The spotlight may pressure youth to answer these questions even if they wouldn’t otherwise.

• Recognize the traumatic nature of what you’re asking youth to share. 

Ensure youth receive support from you, other trusted adults, and/or peers with more public speaking experience to avoid re-traumatization. Depending on the nature of the event, consider planning a safe word youth can use to privately signal discomfort. 

201-level best practices

• Partner with youth throughout the process, from planning the iniital proposal or agenda through debriefing after the event. 

A co-designed workshop will better accomplish your goals for and will avoid tokenizing young people. A token panelist is readily apparent to your audience. 

• Feature youth as a majority of the panel rather than have one youth represent all youth voices.

The experiences of young people, while they may share commonalities, are as unique as each person. Limiting your youth panelists to one risks leaving out crucial diversity of experience and, again, tokenizing an individual youth speaker. 

• Prioritize youth speakers at multiple points in an event, not just during the meal break. 

I’ve been to so many events where youth are relegated to talking over clinking forks and knives. Not only will your attendees appreciate having a moment to break bread with colleagues without interruption, you signal equal value of youth voice by giving youth equal representation in main event sessions.

301-level best practices

• Support youth to step into moderator or leadership roles. 

Youth who have served on panels or spoken at events before may be ready to step into moderator roles or manage a panel themselves. One goal of engaging youth in events can and should be to facilitate their professional development in diverse and evolving ways. 

To delve deeper on these tips or for direct support engaging youth in your organization’s upcoming events, contact me.

Supporting Youth Leaders Growing into Adult Roles

Yesterday’s youth advocates and youth leaders are growing into today’s professional organizers, advocates, social workers, and more. How do older adults, especially their employers and colleagues, support their continued health and growth?

I’ve had the honor of partnering with youth leaders for over a decade and watching as these youth grow into adult leadership roles - often managing youth-adult partnerships themselves as founders or lead staff of organizations. As teens they advocated for legislative or policy change, spoke at professional conferences, and informed the development of programs. Now, as older 20-somethings or early 30-somethings, they seek to engage a new generation of youth in advocacy, decision-making, and leadership. 

Certainly these amazing leaders have much to say about how they face their shifting role and positions, as well as how older adult allies can best support them.  Key challenges I’ve heard expressed by growing leaders have included 

1. addressing trauma from their system experiences that often went unresolved during their time as youth advocates, 

2. adjusting their self-perception, as well as others’ perceptions, to reflect that they are no longer the youth in the room, 

3. partnering with a new generation of youth leaders who see them as adults, and 

4. recognizing that youth today may have different experiences than they did.  

In today’s post, I’ll focus on how older adult allies can support growing leaders to address unresolved trauma.

Adults, especially colleagues or employers, must prioritize holistic healthcare for growing leaders and give growing leaders time for self care, as well as respond to their needs when their new roles place them in particularly challenging situations.

One of the worst, and all too common, mistakes adults make when engaging youth is asking youth to relive traumatic experiences with no recognition or support for their mental health needs. “Tell the room about your time in the system,” is not as harmless a request as adults may think.  

As growing leaders who remain steeped in child welfare or justice systems and who have not yet had the opportunity to address their trauma, growing leaders may be facing exposure to triggers in new ways and still be without opportunities to heal. Two young women I’ve talked with experienced challenges when returning to system facilities as adults. Both of these women struggled through these experiences to carry out their work while surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of these traumatic places. 

In Houston, a growing leader now works in the child welfare system she was in as a child. Her work one day caused her to return to a group home where she previously experienced trauma. She initially didn’t want to cross the building’s threshold and took more time than usual to start her day. Another growing leader in Baltimore served on an advisory body that was asked to give a tour to visitng policy-makers of the jail where she was incarcerated at 14. During the tour, she revisited the unit where she was held and even saw the bed where she slept. She needed reassurance throughout the tour that she could walk out of the jail at any time.

Adult allies should be able to recognize and respond to growing leaders’ challenges in the workplace and open the door to conversations, time for self care, or counseling. Employers, in particular, have crucial roles to play in these day-to-day situations and in crafting organizational culture, employee benefits, and governing policies that prioritize support and healing for growing leaders.

Creating a new table for youth-adult partnership

In a recent conversation, a colleague challenged the group to think about how we create new tables for youth and adult partnership rather than invite youth to join existing adult-run tables. For example, rather than add one or two youth seats to a board that’s been adults-only for 5 years, can we disband the old board in favor of a new one that’s crafted by and for youth and adults together? 

This model for crafting youth-adult partnerships is certainly a gold standard that will be more feasible when creating new decision-making bodies vs. re-imagining existing ones. However, the lessons here can apply to even small adjustments if fully reconstituting an existing decision-making body may not be feasible. 

What will it take to redefine spaces for decision-making that revolve around youth-adult partnership?

Humility - Engage youth in deciding how best to engage them. Are we decision-makers even asking the right questions or concerned about the right problems? 

Stepping back - Consider beginning meetings with only one or two traditional decision-makers at the table and slowly adding more. As the new decision-making structure begins to coalesce, youth members retain their positions of authority within the group and invite traditional decision-makers to take on leadership roles if and when they find value in that. 

Money - Fund “mom and pop” community organizations to build youth engagement in the ways that make sense for them. Support capacity building for those individuals or organizations as necessary, but don’t seek to mold them to your ideas of how engagement should look. 

Flexibility - Youth and community are diverse and need diverse ways of engaging in decisions. You may need multiple opportunities spanning a range from one-time, online surveys through and including shared partnership on a board or commission. Just as every decision-making body has those members who only show up when something big is happening, youth may have particular time or talents they can offer. 

Inviting youth to existing decision-making structures is certainly easier, so why invest the additional effort to create new structures?

• Existing decision-making bodies and the systems they represent may have sewn distrust over years or even generations of disenfranchisement, failed promises, and oppression of the youth, families, and communities they now seek to engage.

• Comfort with the status quo enables traditional decision-makers to retain barriers, such as jargon, between them and youth, families and community.

• The structures adults create for decision-making have struggled to make effective decisions since their inceptions, so why not try something different. 

Whether your organization is ready to create new structures for youth-adult partnership or apply these lessons to an existing decision-making body, I can provide guidance, on-the-ground support, and training at any stage of the process. Contact me to explore how we can work together!

Gratitude - I’m grateful to organizations involved in Minneapolis and St. Paul-area fair housing efforts for exhaustively documenting their process and lessons learned, which inforrmed this article. See, for example. 

How to Be an Adult Partner

Adult partnership is necessary to youth-adult partnership, but adultism can stand as one of the most damaging and persistent barriers to adults’ attempts at true partnership. Just as “racism is a white problem”, Lynettte Stallworth quoted by Dr. Melanie Morrison of Allies for Change, adultism is an adult problem. It is adults’ responsibility, not that of youth, to overcome adultism if we are to build strong youth-adult partnership. 

About Allyship

A component of partnership is allyship. “Allyship” refers to the hard work of dismantling the systems and norms that confer privilege and power while simultaneously giving of one’s privileged space in seats of power to traditionally oppressed people. 

I applied guidance for white people seeking to begin an allyship journey to people of color when developing the five actions below. Adults serving as allies to youth practice many of the same behaviors. 

Five Actions in the Practice of Adult Allyship 

The “practice” of adult allyship is just that - constant practice toward a goal. You don’t wake up one day as an ally. Adultism, like racism and sexism, is deep-rooted and exerts a strong unconscious pull on our decisions and behaviors. Awareness, practice, and humility can allow adults to push against this consistent devaluing of young people, even if the bias continues to try to pull us back. 

• Reflect and educate yourself on how best to practice allyship. 

Ask the youth in your sphere how you can best show up as an ally for them, but don’t rely on them to educate you.

• Stand beside youth. 

Not in front and not behind. Allies are out of the way of youth voice and do not act as a funnel for youth voice. Allies also do not leave youth to lead alone. Partnership is about mutual support and accountability. 

Stand as an equal partner, with equal value and equal weight in decisions. 

• Allow youth to speak on their own terms.

Avoid “translating” what youth say. Allow the authentic voice of youth to be heard. 

• Own and shine a light on adult power.

Adults don’t often recognize our own power over young people. We walk around exercising it unconsciously, many times a day for some of us, but rarely acknowledge it. 

Adult allies consistently ask, at every table, in every room where decisions are made affecting young people: whose voices are valued in this decision? Are adults exerting power over youth?

• Don’t Rely on Good Intentions 

As a white professional in the non-profit industrial complex for over a decade and someone who made the classic mistake of going to law school because I thought it would prepare me to help people, I relied on good intentions far too much in my career. 

Good intentions are not enough to change the behaviors and choices of yourself and the other adults in your decision-making sphere. When you fail, and stumbling is inevitable on any challenging journey, resist falling back on your own good intentions but critically self-evaluate where you went wrong and how you can do better next time. 

A Note About Guilt

For white people, a significant part of the journey to white allyship with people of color can be overcoming guilt and shame. Adults carry a similarly unearned privilege, built and maintained during countless generations. In fact, it is the very powerlessness and de-valuing adults experienced as children and youth that taught us how to exert adult power. However, I don’t see adults experiencing similar feelings of shame and guilt when developing adult allyship as white people do when developing white allyship.

I welcome thoughts and comments on every aspect of this post, and especially on this question of guilt.

Resources that contributed to this post:

In addition to overall reading on allyship and white allyship, in particular, I consulted this great Adult Ally Checklist from Beatriz Beckford, then at WhyHunger and now at MomsRising. @bb on Twitter.  I was also particularly inspired by this post about white allyship by Courtney Ariel (@carielmusic) on the @Sojourners site. I also consulted some of my former youth partners and appreciate their input.

FAQ: Why do I spend so much time focused on adults when supporting youth-adult partnerships?

Adults interested in youth engagement often think the bulk of the work in building youth-adult shared decision making will focus on the youth. However, I see more of the crucial work happening with the adults in the organization.

I have found that the barriers to youth-adult partnership often arise from adults. Overcoming three barriers typically fills much of my early focus with organizations: adultism, bureaucracy and comfort in professional spaces. Once adults open supportive seats at the decision-making table to youth, I find that youth are ready to fill those spaces.

Adultism

This “-ism” joins the collection of implicit biases we all carry, and we can limit their power over our behavior with intentional, conscientious focus. As my colleague Khalid Samarrae of the W. Haywood Burns Institute once so clearly laid out for me, we adults received training as children and youth that our voices were not valuable and we would have to earn our seat at the table through age and experience. Having finally earned our seats, we now repeat that training to a new generation of children and youth.

We also hesitate to let go of what power we have earned. Our perception that we worked hard to earn that power, whether or not leavened by recognizing that our status as adults confers an inherent privilege, makes us fear parting with it.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy may be the hidden menace to all good collaboration. It once took me a year to remove purely bureaucratic barriers to paying youth for participation on an advisory body. I also had to once stop efforts to engage incarcerated youth in a juvenile justice advisory body because the detention facility’s rules required them to wear shackles while in the room.

Recognizing that bureaucracy can have value protecting institutions and individuals, we must continually ask ourselves how do we reduce delays, paperwork, and chains of command to the minimum required to accomplish that protection.

Assumed Comfort in Professional Spaces

Adults spend a lot of time in meetings, writing emails, and speaking in the various codes of our respective professions. We also assume our peers around the table share similar skills. On the other hand, youth spend a lot of time in classrooms, exploring and developing passions, and with peers in person or online. When we bring youth into the adult-centered spaces of meetings and work, we need to make those spaces less adult-centered and more inclusive.

Adults can overcome these barriers to shared decisionmaking by intentionally recognizing and shifting away from adultist behavior, taking a critical eye toward bureaucracy, and building more inclusive collaborative tables.

Inclusion Decision Tree

This video walks you through a simple tool to help determine if your organization includes affected people in its decisions. While I mostly use policy-making for examples here, the Inclusion Decision Tree is useful in diverse situations by any organization hoping to make more effective decisions.

I was honored to originally record this for the Pretrial Justice Institute’s Pi-Con.

FAQ: Should organizations pay youth to serve on councils, boards, or other decision-making bodies?

Rule of thumb: Pay youth if adults receive pay for the same or equivalent work.

Youth should be paid when serving on a board with adults who serve on the board in their professional capacity. If adult are paid, including because service on the board or council is part of their jobs, then youth should also receive a wage.

Why should organizations pay youth?

Youth do receive several benefits from serving on councils, boards, and the like, including professional networks, valuable experience, and resume or college application material. However, paying youth when adults are paid demonstrates that the organization places equal value on the adults’ and young people’s time, expertise and contributions.

In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, paying youth means that youth don’t have to decide between serving on your board for free or working those hours at a job. For many youth, paid work is a necessity to cover their own expenses and to contribute to the family income. You increase your chances of engaging diverse youth voices if you give youth who need income that opportunity through your board.

For these reasons, organizations may also choose to pay youth even if adults in equivalent positions are not paid or no adults serve in equivalent positions.

This series of FAQ posts covers my answers to common questions about youth engagement.