Submitted by David Supp-Montgomerie

What does it take to not just listen to youth, but to involve this in the planning and visioning stages of a project? Involving young people in a coalition, and getting youth to come to events and have their voice be heard, requires reflection on a wide range of issues. This resource is helpfully organized as a series of challenges that are all paired with specific strategies to employ. Below are five of those challenges with one sample strategy. Notice that engaging youth often requires you to rethink your own vision, priorities, and assumptions.

• Making meetings and events appealing to young people
  • Make sure young people see and understand that they will be a valuable part of the team.
• Young people may not be aware of unspoken norms and practices
  • Make space in each meeting to answer any questions about language used or how the team is run.
• The norms and practices are set and communicated by adults
  • Work as a group to be open to the ideas of young people before you invite them to join the committee.
• One young person is asked to be the voice for their peers
  • Have everyone in the group contribute their ideas for recruiting more young people or designing a youth-focused event, not just the young people in the group.
• Decisions made by planning teams don’t reflect the diversity of the community
  • Make sure there's space in your meetings for team members to offer new ways of doing things.

Rebecca Reyes and Malana Rogers-Bursen provide a useful set of strategies for increasing youth participation at every stage of your engagement process. 

Click here for the complete resource from Everyday Democracy.