Youth Today: Beyond Participation

By Karen Pittman, January 1999

Power: That’s the newest word in my youth development mantra. Beyond prevention to preparation. Beyond preparation to participation. Beyond participation to power.

Empowerment language was fashionable a few decades ago. Over the years, it has given way to the more palatable language of participation and leadership, now a burgeoning cottage industry complete with manuals, trainings, national replications and large new initiatives. But conversations about power are coming back “on the charts with a bullet” (to turn an old phrase) thanks to people like Lisa Sullivan, former CDFer and recent founder and director of LISTEN, a new organization committed to increasing the civic participation of urban youth leaders.

In early November, Sullivan stunned and inspired participants at the Enterprise Foundation’s Annual Conference. She did not argue for more opportunities for youth to participate, assume leadership roles and control decisions. She argued that young people are participating, leading and controlling considerable social and economic capital, amassing wealth and generating participation at levels adults can only imagine. Her message was not one of empowerment, but one of power. “Understand alternative youth culture and try to link to it,” she argued, because it exists, it’s strong and it’s getting stronger.

Knowing that we probably would not grasp the full meaning of what she was saying, Sullivan described the extent to which the African-American youth in Washington, D.C., are organized. Locked out of and/or disaffected with adult economic and political power bases in their neighborhoods, young adults have created their own culture. She spoke not just of gangs, but of a sophisticated subterranean social and economic networks built on wireless communications technology; of young entrepreneurs building fortunes in marketing, entertainment and personal services; of established young leaders looking to rebuild the economic base of their communities, on their terms.

She contrasted the pennies that well-meaning nonprofits toss out in the name of youth leadership to the millions that the entertainment and clothing industries spend. Youth-targeted businesses, she argued, recognize the power base and spend millions to understand and leverage it. (Newsweek ran an article in November 1998 on young black entrepreneurs and the urban music industry.)Most importantly, she spoke of the possibility of the traditional and alternative bases of power coming together to move important social and economic agendas — if the traditionals can refrain from patronizing.

Moises Perez, executive director of Alianza Dominicana in New York City, threw away his notes and chimed in. Power, he agreed, was the name of the game. Increasingly, Alianza’s role is to remove or restrain the adult barriers that keep young people from achieving it in the adult world. Alianza has paved the way for a youth-led Beacon school (the executive director was 19 when hired) and a youth mall run by young entrepreneurs, to name just a couple. Perez’s examples of adult skeptics (from school principals to bank presidents) were not new. The examples of youth success, while powerful, were not unique. But the depth of Alianza’s commitment to help youth assume power “above ground” took on added power in the face of Sullivan’s admonition that young people will build below ground what they cannot find space for above.

A few years ago, IYF staff met with the leaders of the Ecuador’s Youth Forum, a youth-led national organization that has sparked hundreds of local forums across the country to encourage youth engagement in community development and political advocacy. The young people spoke to us about the importance of “space.” Appropriately dense, I interpreted this as a call for physical space — youth clubs. Appropriately polite, they informed me that their issue went far beyond that. Space, in their minds, meant an admixture of recognition, respect and resources. These young Ecuadorians would know they were successful, they said, when adults felt the conversation couldn’t start without them.

I equated their benchmark to one that a new in-law might set. They would know they had arrived when the commitment of the spouses’ family moved from being visibly surprised when they arrived for dinner to setting a place for them on the assumption that they were coming. I equate Sullivan’s admonitions to the caution that, if we don’t increasingly set these places early and soon, young people will create their own tables, and we may soon be the ones nervously standing outside the door.
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Pittman, K. (1999, January). "Beyond Participation." Washington, DC: The Forum for Youth Investment. A version of this article appears in Youth Today.

Karen Pittman is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment.