Youth-adult partnership secures everyone’s right to self-determination, increases young people’s power over their own lives, and upends the pervasive privilege-oppressor relationship between adults and youth. Youth-adult partnership takes diverse forms but all center on shared power, shared accountability, shared resources, and shared language.
A first step for philanthropic, non-profit and advocacy organizations, juvenile justice and child welfare agencies, and education institutions that seek to reduce oppression should be investing in a sustainable infrastructure for youth-adult partnership. In upcoming posts, I will share practical opportunities for these diverse sectors to reduce oppression through youth-adult partnership.
The Everyday Oppression of Young People
Among the myriad ways humans find to “other” and oppress each other, I highlight the oppression of young people. Adultism, a common term for silencing youth voices and experiences, intersects with oppression of girls and young women, Black, Indigenous and other young people of color, youth with disabilities, and LGBTQ young people.
However, adultism differs from other forms of oppression in the shift every person experiences over a lifetime from a position of oppression to one of privilege. The automatic and universal experience of aging leads us from a position of oppression as children and youth to one of privilege as adults.
Human brains are well equipped to cloak and/or justify our oppression of others, thus oppressors rarely recognize their oppression for what it is. The universality of adultism makes it even less likely people recognize it as oppression; we accept it as the normal course of life. It shouldn’t be, and it doesn’t have to be.
Youth-Adult Partnership as an Anti-Oppression Tool
Youth-adult partnership takes a variety of forms but is fundamentally a decision-making structure where youth and adults come to the table together, identify an issue or question together, and apply their unique skills, knowledge and assets to solving it together. Everyone shares power, accountability, resources to support their participation, and a common language. Both youth and adults need increased support to make this happen.
In the various professional spaces where adults make decisions affecting youth, real opportunities exist to improve outcomes for organizations, adults and young people and to reduce oppression through youth-adult partnership.
The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange published a condensed version of this series in an article focused on the juvenile justice system.