Celebrating One Year of Laura Furr Consulting

When I began this journey, I promised myself I’d try for six months before second guessing this decision. Here I am a year later and, while I definitely haven’t figured everything out, I’m so grateful to still be building my business.

One Year Celebration!

My family made me a cake to celebrate one year in business

Being able to focus all my energy on youth-adult partnership, combined with the national inching toward racial justice and the growing recognition of youth leaders in diverse public debates, has reaffirmed the central tenet upon which I’ve grounded my work - that young people, and indeed all oppressed people, must be equal partners in the decisions that affect them. That the only way to make meaningful, effective change is through shared power and shared accountability among everyone affected by reforms. 

I am excited to have supported my clients, including the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, the National Association of Counsel for Children, and the National League of Cities, to make progress toward their youth engagement goals. 

Thanks to my colleagues at the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and National Assessment Center Association, I will soon introduce the core tenets of youth-adult partnership and its utility in juvenile justice and diversion to new audiences.

I recently created an opportunity for any adults seeking to strengthen their skills as a partner to youth. My virtual training and coaching services are open to any adults who see the tremendous youth leaders in their midst and want to step up in partnership.  

As local youth councils return to work this Fall, I look forward to supporting their peer learning and mutual support through the Network of Youth Civic Engagement. N-YCE provides a virtual platform for local youth councils, answering the call from so many of the youth council leaders I worked with during my time at the National League of Cities. 

I am very grateful to everyone I’ve worked with and learned from. So many people helped me take that next step by sharing their expertise, passion, time, and energy that I can’t possibly list everyone here. So I say a heartfelt “Thank you!” to everyone reading this. Without you, I would still be overthinking or undervaluing language, stumbling through things on my own instead of getting answers from experts you connected me with, and struggling to believe that this was possible.

There’s still uncertainty and fear on the horizon, but I hope to look back next summer and say I continue to learn, grow and do my best work.

Now is the time for structural systemic change

Now is the time to create new decision-making tables that share power among youth and adults. Justice, education and health systems all face crises, and youth affected by those systems are raising demands for systemic change. 

The best way to achieve long-lasting systemic change is to upend the way we make decisions so that those affected by decisions have a real voice in making those decisions. 

Decision-making bodies work best when they:

• Create a new table established with shared power rather than creating seats for young people or others historically denied power;

• Involve representatives of all the diverse communities affected by the decisions of the body, especially oppressed groups often excluded from power;

• Have meaningful power over decisions, including the ability to hold agencies or individual violators accountable;

• Train all members on sharing power and accountability towards effective partnership and decision-making;

• Equitably resource member participation;

• Establish a shared language consistently used by everyone and avoid jargon;

• Have budget authority to implement decisions; and

• Maintain consistent communication with broader groups since one or two people cannot represent the voices of everyone.

Government and community leaders that act now to share power with those affected by their decisions stand the best chance of meaningful, long-lasting change.

Youth voice in the face of a pandemic

"If we truly value youth voice, engagement, and leadership shouldn’t we include them when navigating the scariest and toughest issues?  If anything we believe this is a time to inject more resources, support, and attention to this work."

- Allison Green, Legal Director, National Association of Counsel for Children

While much of the world remains upside down amidst the pandemic, everyone from students, to criminal justice advocates, to national leaders have begun to call for critical thought about our new normal. Whatever new normal we build should center the voices of the people impacted by decisions. 

Now is the time to engage those affected by our decisions in making those decisions. 

Students, teachers and families can help answer the questions about how education should move forward.  

Patients, young and old, can help craft new healthcare services.

Residents, including future voters, will bring crucial input to how our cities and towns, counties and states support citizens. 

Children, youth and families can bring new life to nonprofits and libraries struggling to keep the doors open.

Children and youth have been irrevocably changed by this experience. Our systems and leadership should not expect them, or indeed any of us, to return to business as usual when it was failing so many. They have always deserved a seat at decision-making tables, and this moment, as horrific as it is, provides opportunities that have rarely before existed to create new, inclusive tables for decisions.

Supporting Youth Leaders Growing into Adult Roles

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 

1. addressing trauma from their system experiences that often went unresolved during their time as youth advocates, 

2. adjusting their self-perception, as well as others’ perceptions, to reflect that they are no longer the youth in the room, 

3. partnering with a new generation of youth leaders who see them as adults, and 

4. 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.

Creating a new table for youth-adult partnership

In a recent conversation, a colleague challenged the group to think about how we create new tables for youth and adult partnership rather than invite youth to join existing adult-run tables. For example, rather than add one or two youth seats to a board that’s been adults-only for 5 years, can we disband the old board in favor of a new one that’s crafted by and for youth and adults together? 

This model for crafting youth-adult partnerships is certainly a gold standard that will be more feasible when creating new decision-making bodies vs. re-imagining existing ones. However, the lessons here can apply to even small adjustments if fully reconstituting an existing decision-making body may not be feasible. 

What will it take to redefine spaces for decision-making that revolve around youth-adult partnership?

Humility - Engage youth in deciding how best to engage them. Are we decision-makers even asking the right questions or concerned about the right problems? 

Stepping back - Consider beginning meetings with only one or two traditional decision-makers at the table and slowly adding more. As the new decision-making structure begins to coalesce, youth members retain their positions of authority within the group and invite traditional decision-makers to take on leadership roles if and when they find value in that. 

Money - Fund “mom and pop” community organizations to build youth engagement in the ways that make sense for them. Support capacity building for those individuals or organizations as necessary, but don’t seek to mold them to your ideas of how engagement should look. 

Flexibility - Youth and community are diverse and need diverse ways of engaging in decisions. You may need multiple opportunities spanning a range from one-time, online surveys through and including shared partnership on a board or commission. Just as every decision-making body has those members who only show up when something big is happening, youth may have particular time or talents they can offer. 

Inviting youth to existing decision-making structures is certainly easier, so why invest the additional effort to create new structures?

• Existing decision-making bodies and the systems they represent may have sewn distrust over years or even generations of disenfranchisement, failed promises, and oppression of the youth, families, and communities they now seek to engage.

• Comfort with the status quo enables traditional decision-makers to retain barriers, such as jargon, between them and youth, families and community.

• The structures adults create for decision-making have struggled to make effective decisions since their inceptions, so why not try something different. 

Whether your organization is ready to create new structures for youth-adult partnership or apply these lessons to an existing decision-making body, I can provide guidance, on-the-ground support, and training at any stage of the process. Contact me to explore how we can work together!

Gratitude - I’m grateful to organizations involved in Minneapolis and St. Paul-area fair housing efforts for exhaustively documenting their process and lessons learned, which inforrmed this article. See, for example. 

How to Be an Adult Partner

Adult partnership is necessary to youth-adult partnership, but adultism can stand as one of the most damaging and persistent barriers to adults’ attempts at true partnership. Just as “racism is a white problem”, Lynettte Stallworth quoted by Dr. Melanie Morrison of Allies for Change, adultism is an adult problem. It is adults’ responsibility, not that of youth, to overcome adultism if we are to build strong youth-adult partnership. 

About Allyship

A component of partnership is allyship. “Allyship” refers to the hard work of dismantling the systems and norms that confer privilege and power while simultaneously giving of one’s privileged space in seats of power to traditionally oppressed people. 

I applied guidance for white people seeking to begin an allyship journey to people of color when developing the five actions below. Adults serving as allies to youth practice many of the same behaviors. 

Five Actions in the Practice of Adult Allyship 

The “practice” of adult allyship is just that - constant practice toward a goal. You don’t wake up one day as an ally. Adultism, like racism and sexism, is deep-rooted and exerts a strong unconscious pull on our decisions and behaviors. Awareness, practice, and humility can allow adults to push against this consistent devaluing of young people, even if the bias continues to try to pull us back. 

• Reflect and educate yourself on how best to practice allyship. 

Ask the youth in your sphere how you can best show up as an ally for them, but don’t rely on them to educate you.

• Stand beside youth. 

Not in front and not behind. Allies are out of the way of youth voice and do not act as a funnel for youth voice. Allies also do not leave youth to lead alone. Partnership is about mutual support and accountability. 

Stand as an equal partner, with equal value and equal weight in decisions. 

• Allow youth to speak on their own terms.

Avoid “translating” what youth say. Allow the authentic voice of youth to be heard. 

• Own and shine a light on adult power.

Adults don’t often recognize our own power over young people. We walk around exercising it unconsciously, many times a day for some of us, but rarely acknowledge it. 

Adult allies consistently ask, at every table, in every room where decisions are made affecting young people: whose voices are valued in this decision? Are adults exerting power over youth?

• Don’t Rely on Good Intentions 

As a white professional in the non-profit industrial complex for over a decade and someone who made the classic mistake of going to law school because I thought it would prepare me to help people, I relied on good intentions far too much in my career. 

Good intentions are not enough to change the behaviors and choices of yourself and the other adults in your decision-making sphere. When you fail, and stumbling is inevitable on any challenging journey, resist falling back on your own good intentions but critically self-evaluate where you went wrong and how you can do better next time. 

A Note About Guilt

For white people, a significant part of the journey to white allyship with people of color can be overcoming guilt and shame. Adults carry a similarly unearned privilege, built and maintained during countless generations. In fact, it is the very powerlessness and de-valuing adults experienced as children and youth that taught us how to exert adult power. However, I don’t see adults experiencing similar feelings of shame and guilt when developing adult allyship as white people do when developing white allyship.

I welcome thoughts and comments on every aspect of this post, and especially on this question of guilt.

Resources that contributed to this post:

In addition to overall reading on allyship and white allyship, in particular, I consulted this great Adult Ally Checklist from Beatriz Beckford, then at WhyHunger and now at MomsRising. @bb on Twitter.  I was also particularly inspired by this post about white allyship by Courtney Ariel (@carielmusic) on the @Sojourners site. I also consulted some of my former youth partners and appreciate their input.

Youth-Adult Partnership Model: National League of Cities City Summit

Every November, a small team of youth and adult partners delivers remarkable programming for 200 youth from all over the country at the National League of Cities’ (NLC) annual City Summit conference. 

The 200 youth are some of the most civically engaged young people in their communities. They serve on youth councils or mayor’s youth advisory boards, they advocate for local change, and they’re part of national youth-led movements. In short, they are models of active citizens.

Youth councils shared their accomplishments for the year and learned from each other.

A team of about a dozen extraordinary young leaders from this already extraordinary group of youth work year-round to create, plan, and lead the conference content for their peers. They accomplish a full agenda of interactive workshops through a youth-adult partnership with staff at NLC.  

The youth in this partnership create the topics for workshops, develop the activities, select speakers, and lead the workshops. Adult partners make sure youth leaders have everything they need to be successful, including supplies and organizational or historical knowledge. The adult partners also use guiding questions to help youth leaders work through sticky spots.

Graffiti Walls

Youth used graffiti walls to express what they love about their cities and what they would change.

Workshops in this year’s Youth Delegate Program at NLC’s City Summit conference included skills training on advocacy through the arts and issue workshops on teen dating violence, climate change, gun violence, and pay equity. 

Youth also learned how very diverse groups each have a vested interest in everyday municipal issues and how to advocate for their side of the issue to the community.

Convincing someone of something you don’t personally believe is challenging. Youth stepped into randomly-assigned roles on various sides of an everyday local issue.

In my former role as NLC staff, I had the honor of being the adult partner for this awesome team. I always learn so much from the youth at the conference and on the youth leadership team and have been honored to be part of the team for over five years. At this year’s November conference, I supported new NLC staff to step into the partnership. I am excited to see how the youth voice opportunities at NLC continue to grow under their leadership.

Inclusion Decision Tree: Intro Animation!

My Inclusion Decision Tree is a simple tool to guide your plan for community engagement. A new animation introduces the five questions in the tree. These five questions can help maximize your chance to make the best decision possible by doing the best community engagement possible.

For help using the Tree or more in depth strategic planning around community engagement, reach out to me.

I was excited to work with an awesome animator in New York to create the animation. His contact available on request.

Youth-Adult Partnership Models: Sustainability Champion

As I highlight champions of youth-adult partnership across the country , I’m reminded that different models work for different organizations. This post highlights one organization that has managed to sustain youth-adult partnership in organizational governance for an extraordinarily long time.

America’s Promise Alliance 

America’s Promise Alliance (https://www.americaspromise.org/) has sustained youth members on its Board of Directors and Board of Trustees for over a decade. America’s Promise reserves at least two seats on its Board of Directors for youth members and currently has three. Youth Board members have full voting and acting rights.

America’s Promise also has youth members on its Board of Trustees, a robust steering committee of leaders from among America’s Promise’s 450+ partner organizations. While not required, the organization does this to mirror its Board of Directors and incorporate youth voice into the fabric of their strategic programmatic work.

America’s Promise does not pay stipends or wages to its youth or adult Board members, but it does cover travel costs for the youth members.

Key to success #1: Cemented in Governance Documents

America’s Promise bylaws require youth seats on the Board of Directors.

Section 3.4 Youth Representation. Young people shall help shape and contribute to Alliance strategies and activities. No less than two (2) youth representatives aged 16-24 shall be nominated and elected to the Board for a term of two (2) years.

Key to success #2: Compromise

Initially, America’s Promise hoped to engage youth under the age of 18 on its Boards. However, the multiple trips around the country required each year and other challenges limited its success.

America’s Promise found that young adults over 18 were better able to meaningfully engage with the existing level of staff support. At the time, America’s Promise wasn’t able to dedicate the additional staff time they felt younger Board members would need and so decided to focus on 18-year-old youth and above until they could fill that additional need. As a result, America’s Promise has been able to meaningfully and consistently engage young adult leaders on its Boards for over a decade.

Key to success #3: A National Recruitment Network of Youth-Service Organizations

As a national-level organization with a vast network of youth-serving organizations, America’s Promise recruits youth Board members through a national call to these organizations. Developing and maintaining a pipeline of rising youth leaders can be a challenge, especially for organizations that do not directly serve youth. Connecting with partners provides meaningful support for ongoing recruitment and can give youth a home-based link through which to access help, training, and guidance as needed.

To learn more about how your organization can sustainably engage youth and adults as partners in decision-making, reach out using the Contact Me page.

Youth-Adult Partnership Models: Authenticity Champion

Champions of youth-adult partnership across the country inspire me and can serve as models for other organizations hoping to engage youth in shared power and decision-making. This post highlights one organization that has managed to build truly authentic youth-adult partnership in organizational governance and decision-making.

National Network for Youth (NN4Y) is a national advocacy organization with the goal of preventing and ending youth homelessness. NN4Y achieves a unique authentic level of youth-adult partnership in two ways. First, the very diverse youth engaged in NN4Y’s leadership have all experienced homelessness. Second, youth “drive decisions at all levels of the organization and have consistently for the past five years”, according to Executive Director Darla Bardine.  

Even stand out youth-led organizations and governments tend to struggle engaging traditionally disenfranchised youth. However, NN4Y not only engages but also builds the leadership capacity of youth who are among some of the most disenfranchised - having experienced homelessness and often youth of color. 

Second, adults at all levels of the organization remain rigorously dedicated to authentic youth voice in their decision-making. From the policies advanced by the organization to education and skill-building for member organizations, youth have shared power in everything NN4Y does.

Key to success #1: Dedicated Staff Support

NN4Y employs a full-time staff person responsible solely for supporting youth leaders and their partnership with the organization. The Director of Youth Partnerships manages youth engagement in NN4Y’s decision-making and provides individual support to youth leaders, meeting them where they are and helping them develop the tools to succeed as advocates and in life.

Key to success #2: Guiding Principles

Among NN4Y’s eight guiding principles is Youth/Adult Partnerships. The guiding principles apply to NN4Y itself and serve as aspirational principles for all of its over 300 member organizations. 

Key to success #3: Dedication at All Levels of the Organization

Every member of NN4Y’s staff and Board of Directors is fundamentally dedicated to the youth leadership of the organization. In addition, NN4Y prioritizes its youth-adult partnership to its funders and makes the case for the importance of sufficient support.

Interested in building authentic youth-adult partnership to achieve stronger decisions for your organization? Reach out to me through the Contact Me page.