Cultivating Youth Leadership in a Virtual World

Focusing on wellness while striving for systemic change

Chayse Sylvester, Director of Programming, & Maya Gordon, Director of Research and Evaluation

Within the Liberation Leader Fellowship (much like the Abolitionist Leader Fellowship), we have a thinking protocol we utilize called “What? So What? Now What?” that helps us frame where we are, what it means, and what we are going to do next. After taking the time to walk through this protocol to reflect on the ALF, we decided it would be ideal to follow this same method in exploring our learnings from the LLF as well. While one fellowship works with adults and the other youth, they have surprising parallels that we believe are a product of the educational environment they both share. As always, we want to utilize our findings to improve our practice and better serve the youth who facilitate our programming. They are an integral part of our mission and the cornerstone of our work.

What?

The Liberation Leader Fellowship offers high school students and college freshmen the opportunity to lead adult participants through workshops and discussions that uncover the real human impact of racism and other forms of systemic oppression. Through our youth-led approach, we foster a healing space for reflection, community, and action. Combined, these educational opportunities are integral in creating an anti-racist society of shared responsibility, with everyone collectively working to create systemic change. Youth serve as either a Community Leader, Cultural Leader, or Connection Leader for one year, and provide 70 hours of paid commitment to the work.

Currently, we have 79 youth leaders serving across the three different tracks who come from all across the country, and they were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants. Their commitment to this work is often inspired by what they see within their own schools and their drive to change things for the better. Youth facilitating training for adults is a unique approach, and it is both impactful and challenging to typical societal norms of who is a teacher and who is a learner. This type of approach works. In fact, our research indicates that 83% of our adult participants agree that the youth-led aspect of the workshops contributed either somewhat or very positively to their learning experience. One of our adult participants captures this sentiment with their reflection: ”I think having the chance to be taught and led by students is always so powerful and I need to remember this often so I can create the same type of environment in my classroom”

The training for an LLF fellow is extensive and spans 40 hours of sessions covering internal bias, racism, prejudice, and more. Our youth participants have reported higher rates of confidence, an increased sense of belonging, higher self-esteem, and an overall sense of empowerment. The program is designed to not just change the adults in our workshops — it is also intended to develop our youth into the leaders the world needs them to be in order to ensure long-term systemic change. So far, they have completed 63 hours of training, facilitated 42 workshops for adult participants, and are projected to complete 46 workshops by the end of the year.

As a part of our program model, the DT program staff regularly collects feedback from youth facilitators and regularly checks in with them to assess their wellbeing, development, and current needs. After several months of these check-ins, trends began to emerge that somewhat mirror the trends in the ALF, and it required the DT staff to reassess in order to meet the needs of the fellows in a more holistic way.

So What?

At the beginning of the programming cycle, in light of COVID, the Program Team decided to shift the model to create a nationwide hybrid fellowship. The goal was ambitious: recruit 130 youth from across the country to participate in three different tracks that would mostly be online. We knew we had to shift our approach away from in-person workshops, and our hope was to expand our reach further in light of this shift to online learning. Almost immediately, we were met with three key challenges:

• Our own capacity. Our internal team shifts, and the rapid growth of the program, made it difficult for the program team to build authentic relationships and offer the level of support we know our youth need as fellows. Prior to this year, we served 25 fellows in an in-person capacity. Expanding to more than double, and having youth all over the country, made those important connections harder to form.
• The Hybrid Model. Training people online is a whole different challenge that we did not anticipate. The engagement, preparation, and demeanor are completely different than in an in-person structure. Suddenly, our youth were faced with entire zoom rooms of turned-off cameras of clearly-disengaged adults, or worse, adults that were far more resistant than they would be in person. In our original approach, youth were training adults who were within their district, many of whom they knew. These adults were both invested in them as people and aware of the program model and its goals. Now, facing rooms full of strangers who often had limited experience with youth, facilitation became exponentially harder. Many adult participants were often ill-prepared for what to expect, even with extensive preparation efforts on the part of DT staff.
• Youth Burn-Out. The combination of having limited program staff capacity and this new, far more challenging online training environment led to substantial youth burn-out that was greater than what we had seen in the past. Our program staff began to notice the need to shift to much more of a support and mentorship role because of the challenges youth were facing, which was harder to do with the higher number of participants. As facilitators shifted back to in-person school, our programming remained virtual which created internal scheduling challenges, higher stress, and uncertainty with their safety in the school environment. Youth were also facing regular push-back from virtual participants which was leaving them frustrated and disenfranchised. There was a significant increase in adult fragility that we had not experienced with in-person participants prior. Youth were facing three key barriers to participant acceptance to their facilitation: the fact that they were people of color, that they were youth, and that they were challenging closely-held beliefs around identity. Even though program staff members were actively providing tools to overcome these barriers, they simply couldn’t prepare youth facilitators for all they might face. Because of this, we experienced some facilitator attrition, and DT staff morale suffered.

Now What?

A Focus on Youth Wellness

After reviewing the data and hearing from our youth fellows, we decided we needed to make some clear and definitive shifts in our programming model. To start, we began concentrating heavily on youth wellness and self-care. We offered rotating facilitation schedules based on youth input and we worked with their personal schedules to ensure balance. We also relied on peer-to-peer mentorship from our in-house Youth Coaches and provided well-being resources from mental healthcare professionals and local organizations to protect youth from burnout and allow them to connect with one another. Similar to the ALF, participants needed that community to find the reinforcement and support they needed to continue the work. Our program staff also shifted into a more formalized role of mentoring and supporting youth, and we provided them with regular one-on-one time. If youth experienced traumatic experiences in our workshops because of adult behaviors, we wanted to provide them with space to address and work through it.

Shifting Back: Going Deeper vs. Wider

Our other key decision is to shift back to our old model of district-specific work instead of national offerings for the 2022–2023 academic year. While we believe that everyone would benefit from a DT workshop, we recognize we don’t have the capacity to do this in a safe way for our youth facilitators, and it isn’t going to have the long-term systemic impact we hoped. In our old model of working, school districts would opt into this work and the youth facilitators would be recruited from that district specifically. These commitments were also much deeper, spanning many months of workshops, and fostering a collaborative approach between adults and youth to improve their own community. There was an investment in the work’s success and mutual respect between adults and youth. In this model, we knew we were working with adults who were familiar with the youth facilitators (and had extensive experience with youth) and the youth would be able to see change happen in their own backyard, which is both rewarding and reinforcing. They needed to see small wins, and they weren’t getting that chance in our national model.

Much like the ALF, we want to create long-term liberated educational communities with the LLF, and the only way to ensure that is to go deep vs. wide. We had to recalibrate our thinking to both preserve our youths’ wellbeing, and also reach our ultimate goal — systemic change. We know we want to eventually change the nation, but we have to start in our own backyards first. Our youth, despite the hardships they have faced this year, are still dedicated to the work, still hungry for change, still striving for more. Many who didn’t start out as natural facilitators have now blossomed into leaders who are piloting their own journeys. They are ready to do the work — and we just have to make that possible for them as adults.