Planning for Power: Making Room for True Youth Leadership by Mandy McGowen
For a time, I facilitated an arts program for elementary youth in the outer Sunset in which they collaboratively created, wrote, designed, and acted in original plays. This program, The Sunset Players, lived in a rare and sacred space of true youth power. They chose to participate. They created the story, their part, their lines, their costume, the sound, the lights, and all the small details in between. In turn, their performances radiated pride, joy, confidence, and freedom.
It was also a mess. Scripts came together at the last minute. Costumes were being broken, sets fell down, and stories very often didn’t make sense. At least a handful of times during every play’s production process I thought, “This is all going to fall apart unless I step in.” I had to remind myself that I did not need to “fix” or “work on” what was going on. It was the student’s process, by their design, and the outcome made them feel successful. This urge to clean-up something that feels messy I believe is often felt by youth developers who facilitate youth leadership experiences. It may come from constructs of white supremacist perfectionism, the capitalistic idea that busy means successful, or the adultism instilled in us from our own youth, but it’s there, inside of us, needing to be confronted.
And confront it I did, from a few different angles. I was hired by the San Francisco Beacon Initiative in August of 2021 as their first BIPOC Youth Liberation Program Manager. I would facilitate the Beacon Leadership Team (BLT, more on this later), work with the Beacon network on identifying our best liberatory practices for BIPOC youth and growing, strengthening, and diversifying those practices. To better understand how to successfully carry this role and where my “fix-it” urge comes from, I did a lot of reading and learning. I’m a middle aged white woman who has worked in Beacons since 2012. I grew up in a white, upper middle class town in Northern California and attended conservative UC Irvine for college. My first real learning on race, how it affects our education system, and what it means to be white only started when I attended graduate school at New York University in 2010. My privilege as a white woman and the diminishment of BIPOC culture and experience in learning became regular touch points of reflection throughout my career. I dug deeper into learning after the murder of George Floyd. From reading How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza, and Tema Okun’s article white supremacy culture I started to see the perfectionism I viewed in myself as an asset was driving me to focus on mistakes and inadequacies. I saw that my default reaction to issues in the classroom and workplace is “only I can fix this” and how that attitude could be a microaggression to my BIPOC students and co-workers. With the knowledge of where this urge was coming from and the understanding that unlearning it would improve my ability to work in community to make systemic change, I was ready to practice.
There was no better practice ground than facilitating the Beacon Leadership Team (BLT) in completing a Youth Participatory Research Project (YPAR). BLT is a group of youth and adults from Beacons across San Francisco that meet weekly throughout the school year to build their leadership skills, connections to other Beacons, and capacity for change-making. YPAR is defined on UC Berkeley's YPAR Hub as “an innovative approach to positive youth and community development based in social justice principles in which young people are trained to conduct systematic research to improve their lives, their communities, and the institutions intended to serve them.” Facilitating this team and project through a lens of true youth leadership would force me to practice getting out of the way. In reflecting on what structural elements of BLT supported this practice, I realized the identity celebrating we committed to as a group was powerful in mitigating my take-over response. The stronger the bond was across the group the more I understood no matter how messy things might feel to me, we held it together and everything was exactly where it should be.
As we all know the 21/22 school year was full of Covid wack a mole, so we mostly met through Zoom with only a few in-person meetings that were still offered hybridly. The group consisted of 15 students and 6 adults from 7 different middle school sites. Some students never got to meet the group in-person. Making this team and our YPAR project a whole human experience would take intentional effort. I featured identity sharing in the mission statement I offered at our first meeting,
BLT is a youth and adult partnership committed to celebrating identity, connecting youth, and making change.
I say offer because I created it myself and provided space at every meeting for our group to hear it, think on it, and make adjustments based on their experience. No changes were ever recommended which made me feel like something was wrong. I felt this mission statement had to be explored on a deeper level. However, I also understood that what I felt was not necessarily the experience of those around me. Anonymous end of the year survey results showed that 90% of participants felt this mission statement aligned with our work throughout the year. Just keeping the space was enough.
We spent time at every meeting allowing people to share and appreciate their whole selves. We completed “New Friend Research'' in which everyone added a question in a google form to learn something new about their team members and then everyone filled out the form. A very well received idea that totally tanked when a student unknowingly deleted most of the questions before everyone could fill it out. I initially thought we should devote a meeting to redoing this activity correctly but this was not the vibe I got from the rest of the group. We did talk about what was learned in regards to research from this activity and an intense understanding of the preciousness of data was formed from this mutual experience, very powerful. I was slowly learning to quiet my internal noise and tune into the wisdom of the group.
Together, we created Identitrees, a Spotify playlist of our favorite songs, and Circles of Our Multicultural Selves. We asked sign-in questions, check-in questions, and check-out questions. Complex, fascinating, powerful individuals were taking shape in our Zoom room. Identity sharing and community building not only bonded the group, it showed me the power our students held from their diverse lived experiences.
An honest but painful realization from BLT 21/22 was that I approached youth leadership projects with my plans, my vision, and a powerless group of students in my head. I knew my objective was for youth to lead but truly embracing that didn’t exist in my planning process. I didn’t plan for the youth to be powerful. Instead of leaving room for all the teaching and enlightenment youth would bring to the project, I stressed and structured and planned. In preparing for this upcoming year’s BLT I’m paying close attention to my mindset; leaning into curiosity for the specific powers each youth will bring and away from the belief I need to work hard to bring about these powers.
I recently listened to adrienne maree brown talk about scarcity and hoarding during a session from the Institute of Radical Permission. She imparted that in this world there is enough when we take what we need. It is when we hoard things that there becomes a scarcity for others or ourselves. I’m not free from the hoarding impulse yet, but my efforts to suppress it yielded amazing results. My ability to get out of the way led to the young people of BLT doing great things. They created a 23 question survey on the biggest issues facing middle school students. They reached out to their own and other middle schoolers to get over 850 responses that included students from every Beacon middle school. They organized, coded, and analyzed mountains of data to create a presentation with their recommendations that they shared with the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth, and their Families (DCYF), Beacon Directors, Principals, and their own peers. They started to envision what could be for middle school students if everyone has what they need. In my own stillness, I was better able to tune into the hum of youth leadership in action. There is an energy, a feeling, for me a hum that comes about when youth are connected to a project and steering the ship on their own. The Zoom room was humming when BLT students discussed this finding and recommendation.
Do you identify yourself as part of the LGBTQIA+ community?
“This research is important because middle school students are all trying to find themselves and who they are as people. I think that some kids are still trying to figure out who they are and may also be scared to say that they are. The LGBTQIA+ community is something that should be celebrated at schools and should be welcomed. At VVMS we have a club for people who identify with the LGBTQIA+ community and we meet in the wellness room and are able to be a community at school.”
I can remember the hum of leadership during Sunset Players performances, but didn’t yet have the knowledge to get curious about it or spend time thinking about strategies to grow it. As an educator, I get super turned on about teaching a class or running a project for a second time. The growth you can attain if you're committed to understanding what you did and doing it again better is immense; and I’m in this work to make the world and myself better. As I prepare for the 22/23 Beacon Leadership Team, I’m envisioning a blank space that can be constructed and designed by returning and new BLT members. I’m setting last year’s YPAR project, the words and work of young people, as a bedrock from which our new project will grow. Based on feedback from the group, we’re welcoming 5th graders this year and creating more opportunities for youth to lead youth. I’m reminding myself over and over that planning for the power of young people is a mindset, not a list of things to do.
