Video: Youth in Action
While the Perrin Family Foundation has spent the past two decades supporting the leadership development of young people in Connecticut, our understanding of and approach to leadership development has undergone a dramatic shift. Initially, we understood leadership development simply as a strategy to help cultivate in young people the confidence, resilience and skills to successfully navigate adolescence and grow into successful, self-sufficient, and engaged community members. We still believe that investing in leadership development will accomplish that, we also grew to realize that too often, the staid approach to developing youth leaders simply enables young people to navigate the obstacles created by inequity, rather than actively engaging young people as leaders in efforts to challenge and change the policies, practices, institutions, and systems that create and perpetuate these inequities. Every decision made on a local, state and national level, on issues ranging from education to immigration to policing practices and tax policy - shapes the contours of young peoples lives – yet their voices are all too often absent from public discourse and critical decision-making processes.
In 2012, we partnered with the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing to conduct a field scan on youth-led social change in Connecticut.We discovered that while there are many services provided to youth and many advocates speaking for youth, the opportunities for young people to voice and lead change were startlingly scarce.
The insight and lessons culled from that process convinced us that our commitment to leadership development must occur in the broader context of social change, a process which builds the power of those most directly impacted by societal inequities while addressing the root causes of injustice and advancing systemic change. We grew to understand that individual growth and community transformation are mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked. At its core, youth-led social change seeks to transform not just the individual but also the individual’s community and, ultimately, society itself. The video below captures some of the uniquely powerful ways that young people grow and develop when they have the opportunity to do just that.
Laura McCargar is a program officer at the Perrin Family Foundation where she oversees the foundation’s youth organizing grantmaking and capacity building initiatives. She is also a board member of the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing.
