Closing Reflection: Ten Years, Ten Lessons
Lessons from a Decade of Youth–Adult Partnership
When we began this work more than a decade ago, I thought we were building youth leadership. I had less appreciation for how much adult leadership would need to change in the process.
These ten lessons reflect what we have learned through practice, including the mistakes, conflicts, and disappointments that inevitably accompany efforts to change established ways of working. They are not a blueprint. Youth–adult partnership looks different across communities, organizations, and circumstances. But certain principles have held up over time.
Young people need meaningful opportunities to exercise power, not simply opportunities to be heard. Adults need to take young people seriously without abandoning their own responsibilities. Both need to be willing to challenge assumptions, negotiate differences, acknowledge mistakes, and remain accountable for what they do.
None of this is particularly easy.
Over the years, I have watched young people testify before legislators, influence public policy, challenge institutional practices, support one another through difficult circumstances, and assume leadership in their families and communities. I have also watched adults struggle with sharing authority, institutional resistance, competing obligations, and their own assumptions about what young people can and should do.
The work has convinced me that youth–adult partnership cannot be reduced to a program, an advisory council, or a set of engagement strategies. It requires changes in how decisions are made, whose knowledge counts, how responsibility is distributed, and how people work through disagreement.
It also requires sustained attention to relationships. Not because relationships are a substitute for structural change, but because they are essential to making that change possible and durable.
At Be Strong Families, we have always understood strengthening families and communities as inseparable from strengthening the relationships within them. Youth–adult partnership puts that understanding to the test. It challenges us to practice the respect, shared responsibility, accountability, and love that we advocate.
As we look toward the next decade, I expect the circumstances of our work to change considerably. The underlying questions will be familiar: Who has power? Who gets to participate in decisions? Whose experience is treated as knowledge? What do we owe one another? And what are we willing to change in response to what we learn?
After more than ten years, I am less interested in whether organizations say they value youth voice than in what happens when young people use that voice to challenge something the adults would prefer to leave alone.
That is where partnership becomes real.