Youth In Decision-Making: A Study on the Impacts of Youth on Adults and Organizations

The field of positive youth development has built a solid foundation of theory, program, and research, and is now focusing on implementation and sustainability. The current challenge is to clearly articulate best practices and to bring them to scale, while seeking to demonstrate effectiveness and accountability. Central to these efforts is the movement to include the voice, ideas, and experiences of young people at the tables where important decisions are made.

This movement’s philosophy is hardly new. Twenty-six years ago, for example, the National Commission on Resources for Youth described the goals of youth participation in ways that are highly consistent with those discussed today.

Beginning with the successful effort to reduce the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen years in the late 1960s and continuing through the establishment of policies that support community service, service learning, and youth leadership, much progress has been made towards engaging youth in building healthy communities for themselves and for others. Yet social change is always slow and incremental, and there are many barriers to overcome. Policy advocates know there is much more to be done.

The current emphasis is on infusing young people into all levels of organizational decision-making. What makes this priority quite different from those of the past is that advocates are pushing for youth to be directly involved in the deliberation and enactment of organizational policy. Young people, these advocates say, need to be involved not only in day-to-day programming decisions, but they should also be involved in organizational governance. It is only through this "infusion" that communities will be able to promote the development of all youth and adults.

Rationale for This Research

Over time, marked discontinuity has emerged in the United States between what we expect from youth and what we expect from adults. Moreover, adolescents remain marginalized in community decision-making processes, and are infrequently invited to engage in collective problem solving. This isolation creates social contexts where negative stereotypes may flourish, and results in few opportunities for youth and adults to work in partnership. Further, these contexts and stereotypes are sustained by policies that assume young people are unable or unwilling to contribute to the common good.

The past decade has witnessed an impressive array of models that integrate youth more fully into the decision-making processes of organizations, collaborations, and public institutions.

Unfortunately, research has not kept pace with the advances of practice. Although it is clear that bringing youth to the table can have powerful, positive impacts on young people, there is no research to address its effects on adults, organizations, and communities. The current project addresses this gap.

The lack of research is important, for research has been instrumental to the success of many movements in human services. Of course, there is no substitute for advocacy, demonstrating good practice, and key events in historical time; rarely does one study or set of studies make the difference when it comes to reforming policy. But research provides a foundation of support for social change. It can serve three basic purposes for those advocating for greater youth involvement in decision-making.

1. Research can address accountability concerns. It can empirically substantiate best practices and provide additional substance to practitioner wisdom. It offers a test of current assumptions and raises new issues.
2. Research can propel dissemination processes. Unfortunately, relatively few youth are engaged in civic participation and a small minority of organizations engages youth in governance roles. Research-based materials can add clarity and definition to those who wish to involve youth but who do not know where or how to begin the work in their own communities.
3. Research-based knowledge offers a different type of legitimacy than practitioner knowledge. Combined, the two can offer the most convincing message. Research knowledge is often written. It is easily accessed when information is needed for advocacy or fund-raising purposes.

Study Questions and Method

Slowly, more organizations are involving youth. Two estimates are available. First, the National Center for Nonprofit Boards claims that 3 percent of nonprofit board members are under the age of twenty-nine. However, this estimate does not reflect youth governance roles outside the board of directors. Second, a study by the Princeton Survey Research finds that about half of all non-profit organizations are involving young people (age fifteen to twenty-nine) in decision-making and leadership roles. The vast majority of these organizations do not involve youth in governance roles. It is noteworthy that in both studies “young people” are defined as those as old as twenty-nine years of age.

Without question, involving young people in decision-making promotes positive adolescent development. But as we began this research we wondered if such involvement really had broader impacts on adults and organizations. Although we hoped so, we had some skepticism. Thus, this study explored questions that we asked in exploring our own skepticism.

• Does youth governance lead to additional changes that improve conditions for young people not directly involved in decision-making processes?
• Does involving young people in decision-making have positive influences on adults?
• Does it help adults become stronger allies with youth? And youth with adults?
• Does it contribute to organizational effectiveness, creating organizations that are better able to meet the developmental needs and concerns of adolescents?

For this study, we sought to achieve a rich diversity of organizations and decision-makers. An intentional sample of nineteen youth and twenty-nine adults from fifteen organizations across the country participated. Eight organizations had young people on their boards of directors for a minimum of two years. Seven comparison organizations had strong histories involving youth in program decision-making, but not at the board level.

Data were collected through individual and focus group interviews. Our analysis strategy was the extended case method. In an iterative fashion, this method identifies practice-based theories of the field and systematically compares them with findings generated from the current study and with knowledge gleaned from previous research.

A Brief Note on Language

There is little agreement among advocates about language describing youth involvement in decision-making in organizations, institutions, and coalitions. The following definitions represent our best understanding of the consensus that exists in the field, and we use them in the report.

Youth infusion refers to the fundamental goal: to integrate youth and young adults into all spheres of community life and to ensure that their voice and action are valued and utilized in efforts aimed at social or community change. At the organizational level, an institution is “infused” when youth are valued as effective partners and when structures are created at multiple levels to ensure that the voice of young people is represented in decision-making.

Youth governance (or youth decision-making) is a fundamental and core strategy of youth infusion. It refers to those situations where youth work—often in partnership with adults—to set the overall policy direction of organizations, institutions, and coalitions. Youth decisions may be administrative (e.g. hiring staff, designing pro-grams, or conducting needs assessments) or operational (e.g., leading youth groups or training volunteers.) These terms often refer to young people working on boards of directors, sanctioned committees, planning bodies, and advisory groups.

Most organizations define youth and young people as people between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. We use these age parameters as well.

From the Executive Summary and Introduction. Click Download PDF to view the full study.