This case study explores the unique, impactful contributions that emerging youth leaders are making in the Pathways for Youth Employment program. By centring lived experience as a key body of expertise, youth leaders are helping to progress the dialogue at leadership tables, changing the power dynamics of collective leadership. Not only are they helping shine a light on youth experiences in the Canadian labour market, but they are also helping reshape a conversation about how best we might work across age, demographics and roles to ensure that Canadian youth are central to efforts and discussions that directly impact them.
One of the most crucial, challenging and ultimately, impactful foundational elements of Collective Impact initiatives occurs during the earlier phases of a collaborative project. Alongside the strategic thinking needed to build an effective common agenda (how we think and plan for the future together), and the integration and coordination needed to map community ecosystems (how we link collective effort together), the formation of the leadership table is arguably the most crucial early activity when initiating community collaborations. Multi-sectoral collaborations, centring of community voice, aligning government, non-profit organizations and private sector efforts, guiding the emergence of a collective strategy and ensuring well-coordinated measurement and monitoring all start with an effective leadership table, and careful initiation of processes, governance and inclusion can have significant positive impacts on the roll-out of community innovation projects.
In the Pathways for Youth Employment (PYE) community of changemakers, this set of leadership table opportunities and challenges is further impacted by the creation of leadership tables that depend upon emerging youth leadership practice, youth voice, and relationality between youth advocates and established community leaders. This brief article looks across PYE communities to explore some of the critical ways in which PYE leadership tables have helped youth leaders to navigate new systems change contexts and co-lead Collective Impact initiatives in their communities that will help to reshape place-based innovation and support emerging community innovation that is responsive, inclusive and intergenerational.
Navigating Power for Youth at the Leadership Table
The most obvious and perhaps most challenging factor for new youth leaders is navigating the power asymmetries that can arise when forming a new leadership table alongside existing and established community leaders (Evans, 2007). For established community leaders, business leaders, and government representatives accustomed to multi-sectoral collaboration, the practice of collective leadership is often assumed. Leaders with years of experience can often forget the barriers they faced at the start of their journey. In the PYE program, youth leaders leveraged a few soft and hard skills to help form a broad base of collaborative practice. One of the most compelling comments from communities revolved around the need to build better bridges between emerging youth voices and established community leadership. Several PYE leaders commented on the power to bridge the divide by centring the lived experience of youth facing employment barriers.
Increasingly, lived and living experiences are being centred in community development initiatives and for very good reasons. Lived and living experience, expertise grounds theory and concept in the real world. It takes broad, generalizable ideas about leadership and collaboration, and places them against the backdrop of real-world challenges. When PYE leaders centre their own lived and living experience as they build their leadership tables, they elevate the tables’ capacity to address the actual, lived realities facing youth, and help to build the skills of established leaders within the appropriate youth employment context. This helps to flatten leadership power asymmetries by focusing on the key role of lived and living experience in addressing community issues. By drawing out existing power asymmetries, it can help to illuminate areas where other power imbalances are emerging at the table and assist in building the table’s ability to see youth voice as a critical catalyst in holistically addressing community issues. Established leaders see their own practice grow and evolve by centring the voice of new, emerging youth leaders, while those same youth leaders can learn from those established leaders eager to grow and evolve their practice.
Youth Voice: Intergenerational Strengths in Storytelling
The current analysis around youth employment situates it as an issue amplified by broader, current issues facing youth (e.g., housing insecurity, etc.) (Ralph & Arora, 2022). This context also exists within a social media landscape that can often make storytelling approaches instant, broad and democratized, but not always strategic. This underlines another pressing reality that PYE youth leaders can often face at the formation of the leadership table. PYE youth leaders are working to adopt and grow the substantial skillset of leading community innovation. As their leadership table develops, they face the need to quickly absorb and adapt skills such as ecosystem mapping, strategic thinking and planning (e.g., plan-on-a-page), strategic partnership development and management, and, in this case, community engagement and storytelling that can capture and share the realities of building innovation projects that address youth employment.
Operating from a base of lived and living experience and expertise, PYE youth leaders layer new modes of communication and sharing that are often second nature for them. PYE leaders across Canada are working diligently with their peers to leverage the new media skills of a digital generation, enabling a type of intergenerational community engagement that can better navigate the shifting nature of strategic communications in a social media world - who to connect with in the moment, what to share in a timely manner, what platform to share it on, etc. Leveraging their own collective digital lived and living experience as a key body of knowledge for sensemaking in this modern context, they are co-creating a dialogue where modern realities facing youth are layered upon a more technical analysis of youth employment, and made sharable in a modern, social media-enabled manner. Importantly, this helps to elevate the voices of other youth participants and youth community members, as it lifts their preferred avenues for communication and storytelling, and centres new modes of meaning-making that may escape more established leader practice around the table.
Example: YellowKnifeIn Yellowknife, one of the seemingly small but impactful challenges that emerged was witnessed in the differing nature of communications around the leadership table. While older, more established leaders were comfortable working via text-heavy email, this could lead to a breakdown in communications for youth participants around the table. Since we know how critical continuous, effective communications are for a functioning leadership table, addressing this was a crucial step in engaging an intergenerational dialogue. By reshaping leadership table communications in shorter, condensed graphic formats which could be shared on Instagram, for example, the youth leader in Yellowknife was able to appeal to all participants around the table, provide a brief and concise communications paper trail for leaders, and ensure the youth voice was centred in discussions. This had the secondary impact of building the confidence of all leaders to connect and build more effective relationships. |
Centring Youth at the Leadership Table
As Samari and Schmitz remind us, “An effective collective impact culture makes everyone feel they belong, have influence, and see that their contributions matter to the ultimate result” (Samari & Schmitz, n.d.). Equity and inclusion are critical to ensuring an initiative addresses the needs of all. In community development contexts, youth voices are central to ensuring such an inclusive and diverse approach, but are often an afterthought in traditional systems change contexts (Bloomer et al., 2023). In the PYE program, youth leaders are working to centre the voices of all youth groups, making sure traditionally marginalized youth voices representing racialized, indigenous and queer youth are seen, heard and brought into power-sharing, leadership and development opportunities. This helps to illuminate the power of intergenerational leadership tables in community innovation more broadly, but here it reflects the efforts of youth leaders to build out a PYE program where inclusion and equity are at the core of the work, and not an afterthought. This approach reflects Samari and Schmitz's sense that effective Collective Impact leadership creates “processes that instill trust, inclusion, learning, celebration, and even healing into the collective”, opening ways forward to truly innovate in inclusive, responsive and equitable ways.
Example: Grand Prairie, AlbertaFor many emerging youth leaders, seeing themselves as an equity-seeking demographic is a powerful position to take. This can help youth to form deeper types of allyships around the work and broaden the types of allied impact they can have alongside other demographics. In Grand Prairie, Alberta, PYE youth participants felt that the existing rules at The City of Grand Prairie around the use of social media contributed to this type of marginalization, not only keeping youth stories of change out of the conversation but also telling a broader story about the marginalization of youth voice and the media avenues often championed by youth. These stories, which often materialize across existing social media platforms, are subject to a set of rules that, while crafted with care, may also work to marginalize youth voices. By advocating to the City of Grand Prairie for changes in media engagement rules to better accommodate social media, youth leaders are centring the diverse ways in which other groups may seek to tell their own stories, and are asking established leaders to consider how the rules we make may unexpectedly negatively impact others in our communities. |
Conclusion
Diverse, adaptable and inclusive leadership tables are at the heart of strategic and integrated collective action. However, traditional and established leadership roles and practices can struggle to adapt and to reflect contemporary, current community development contexts. PYE youth leaders have helped to contribute modes of intergenerational thinking, inclusive leadership practice and are reshaping leadership power dynamics to better reflect the lived and living experiences of youth seeking employment. Not only does this help to build stronger and more responsive collective impact, but it also enables community innovation that can reflect and embody a broad, inclusive and equitable intergenerational systems change.
This project is funded by the Government of Canada's Youth Employment and Skills Strategy Program.
