Yesterday’s youth advocates and youth leaders are growing into today’s professional organizers, advocates, social workers, and more. How do older adults, especially their employers and colleagues, support their continued health and growth?
I’ve had the honor of partnering with youth leaders for over a decade and watching as these youth grow into adult leadership roles - often managing youth-adult partnerships themselves as founders or lead staff of organizations. As teens they advocated for legislative or policy change, spoke at professional conferences, and informed the development of programs. Now, as older 20-somethings or early 30-somethings, they seek to engage a new generation of youth in advocacy, decision-making, and leadership.
Certainly these amazing leaders have much to say about how they face their shifting role and positions, as well as how older adult allies can best support them. Key challenges I’ve heard expressed by growing leaders have included
addressing trauma from their system experiences that often went unresolved during their time as youth advocates,
adjusting their self-perception, as well as others’ perceptions, to reflect that they are no longer the youth in the room,
partnering with a new generation of youth leaders who see them as adults, and
recognizing that youth today may have different experiences than they did.
In today’s post, I’ll focus on how older adult allies can support growing leaders to address unresolved trauma.
Adults, especially colleagues or employers, must prioritize holistic healthcare for growing leaders and give growing leaders time for self care, as well as respond to their needs when their new roles place them in particularly challenging situations.
One of the worst, and all too common, mistakes adults make when engaging youth is asking youth to relive traumatic experiences with no recognition or support for their mental health needs. “Tell the room about your time in the system,” is not as harmless a request as adults may think.
As growing leaders who remain steeped in child welfare or justice systems and who have not yet had the opportunity to address their trauma, growing leaders may be facing exposure to triggers in new ways and still be without opportunities to heal. Two young women I’ve talked with experienced challenges when returning to system facilities as adults. Both of these women struggled through these experiences to carry out their work while surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of these traumatic places.
In Houston, a growing leader now works in the child welfare system she was in as a child. Her work one day caused her to return to a group home where she previously experienced trauma. She initially didn’t want to cross the building’s threshold and took more time than usual to start her day. Another growing leader in Baltimore served on an advisory body that was asked to give a tour to visitng policy-makers of the jail where she was incarcerated at 14. During the tour, she revisited the unit where she was held and even saw the bed where she slept. She needed reassurance throughout the tour that she could walk out of the jail at any time.
Adult allies should be able to recognize and respond to growing leaders’ challenges in the workplace and open the door to conversations, time for self care, or counseling. Employers, in particular, have crucial roles to play in these day-to-day situations and in crafting organizational culture, employee benefits, and governing policies that prioritize support and healing for growing leaders.