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.

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.

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.