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.