As youth voice advocates many of us tend to emphasize young people's contributions and achievements as if they were working on their own. We refer to youth-adult partnerships, but to persuade the skeptics that young people - even the youngest ones - are indeed ready and able to make substantive contributions to social issues, we focus the attention on the young leader alone.
I'd say that many young leaders often do the same.
I'm thinking especially of large scale, very visible social initiatives that were started by kids. We highlight them as examples of what young people can do, we invite them to speak at our events or to join our boards, and they get well-deserved press coverage. But in many of those cases, we only tell part of the story: how the child came up with the idea, how she got her peers involved, how he raised funds, how they were invited to speak at large forums, and how that catapulted their project to involve thousands. The adults who listened without judging, who supported without imposing, who brought other adults and their resources on board to help the program grow as the child envisioned it often remain in the background.
Lisa Frank, a young leader and student currently working at YSA with whom I shared these ideas, brought up a good point: the American culture of individualism and “self-made” entrepreneurship has a lot to do with our tendency to focus the lens on individual achievements - either of youth or adults – leaving out the support networks that made their success possible. Lisa also made me realize that there’s another advantage to youth recognizing all those who are helping them. Not only can they be more proactive in reaching out to different partners for specific needs, but can also establish a network of reciprocity through which the youth can also support adults’ efforts with their particular assets.
When any individual develops a new idea, they hardly do it alone; everyone needs a network of supporters along with their expertise, contacts and resources. And it's perfectly natural for young leaders to rely on others, not because of an age difference with adults but because that's just how an idea becomes a reality: with help from a lot of people. If we don't mention the adults that contributed skills, funds, and expertise to move the young leader's project forward, we create an unrealistic image that may lead other children to think "I can’t do that!" and adults to ask "How could he do that? He's only a kid!"
I would argue that to lend even more credibility to young people's civic achievements we need to talk about the broader network they count on. I can imagine a conversation at home when 9 year old Alisa brings up the idea of starting a program to help victims of recent earthquakes. Mom listens, encourages, and as the plans take shape she thinks of Jon, her cousin who works for a company that makes heavy-duty bags. Mom suggests to Alisa to call Jon, Jon arranges for Alisa to meet his boss and share her plans and a week later the company donates bags to send supplies to an agency that coordinates donations. Delia, a neighbor, is a web developer who sits down with Alisa to design a website for her program. And as Alisa recruits more kids and grows her organization, so does her adult support network that contributes access, contacts, transportation, special expertise, and other resources. When Talia Leman who started RandomKid for example, set up her organization, her website recruited adult volunteers to fill roles such as accountant, someone with retail experience, and board members - as long as they were ready to follow rather than lead the children involved.
That young people are capable of leading and making substantive contributions to the public good is not surprising for adults who see them as equals. But as we talk with individuals who question kids' readiness for civic involvement, it may be helpful to point out that much like adult change makers rely on support systems, so do young leaders. The difference, however, is that these kids' have "exceptional" adults around them, who really listen, who actually stand behind them, and help them achieve their vision.
