Realizing a Vision of Genuine, Equitable, Intergenerational Collaborations

By Jeff M. Poulin

As arts, cultural, and creative educators, we often think about our own experiences as a young person, and more specifically, a young creative. In fact, at Creative Generation, we regularly encourage the use of critical reflection - a process to think about, document, and explore one’s own experiences as data - to influence future actions.

As I travel around the world speaking about our work, I often share my own story as a young dancer (tap dance, baby!) and music theatre performer. I spend a lot of time unpicking these experiences and relating them to the civic and social change embedded in the study of these artforms. For the last several years, I have also begun sharing the other side of my years as a young person - when I was finding my voice for advocacy, policy change, and nonprofit organizational leadership.

Formative Genuine Collaborations

If you have been in any of my presentations since 2019, you may have seen either or both of the below photos.

As a high school sophomore, I got involved with a statewide, youth empowerment organization, called the Maine Youth Action Network. In my role as a youth staffer, I was empowered to lead youth-adult partnership trainings with youth, adults, and policy-makers throughout the state. We even worked to support young people in their endeavors to testify to and advocate at the legislature - most notably, the legislation to establish two youth positions on the State Board of Education (which has evolved into a Student Cabinet). As an aside, there are 33+ states who now practice this!  

One of the ways that I contributed to this was employing my own interest and experience in the arts to support other youth - specifically the application of the performing arts to increase confidence in public speaking and engendering influence in advocacy. In the photo below, you can see me leading a theatrical dance/chant/ice breaker, called the Funky Chicken! These efforts were not mine alone, however; they were cultivated through a collaboration between myself and my adult counterpart, Deb. 

Two years later, my passion for this type of change (likely paired with some light teen angst) was translated into the formation of an arts nonprofit aimed at supporting youth performers to use their artistic practice to positive contribute to their community, specifically in raising funds for causes which they cared deeply about - it was called Perform for a Cure. To establish this organization, which was the idea of a 10 year old fellow dancer/friend/student of mine named Rachel, alongside her mom, Hannah, and my dad. Check out this vintage photo from a photoshoot we did in our third year!

There is no doubt in my mind that the relationships between myself, as a young person, with both Deb and Hannah were formative to both my journeys as a young activist and as a young creative. As I critically reflect on these relationships, I specifically note the equal power between us (sometimes literally in a facilitated space or in the legal paperwork for the nonprofit) and continued relationships as I transitioned from youth to college student to full-fledged adult.

Honestly, these are two of the most formative relationships to my view of collaboration with young creatives today.

Influencing Work Advancing the Field through Cyclical Mentorship

For those that know me, it will come as no surprise that I have been fixated on supporting positive youth-adult collaborations in both art-making and systems change for almost my entire career - as a researcher, education program lead, policy-wonk, educate, and more. 

Tharting in 2017, I led a dialogue at a national conference, which resulted in a subsequent initiative on the topic of Cyclical Mentorship. This was later expanded into a body of work by my colleague at Creative Generation (and in the 2018 initiative, too!), Jordan Campbell, who has written extensively on the topic - check out this initial blog and its follow up! 

Cyclical mentorship is an assets-based approach to mentorship, where focus is placed on individual strengths and the diversity in thought, culture, and traits. To sum up the core of this inquiry, we often refer to an early session exploring this topic when one attendee pondered, "So, it's like redefining who is the 'question-asker' and who is the 'answer-giver'?" 

In this model, we see the dynamic relationship between young people and their adult educators, as well as intergenerational relationships between emerging, mid-career, and veteran practitioners.

Spectrum of Equitable Intergenerational Collaboration

As this work continues to develop, we have spent time uncovering the possibilities of a spectrum of youth-adult partnerships relevant to arts and cultural education programs, continuing to redefine who is the 'question-asker' and who is the 'answer-giver'. 

In the below diagram, one can identify and place themselves in the relevant category; you might read this like a speedometer. Much like driving, before you, as an educator, can determine the speed of your car and apply the gas, you must consider the conditions, like the terrain, curvature of the road, and visibility. The same goes for working with youth: before determining the type of intergenerational collaboration, we must inquire about the conditions and apply collaboration equitable to meet the needs of the youth collaborator. The categorization below is intended to provide vocabulary and some "rules of the road," if you will, about how to navigate the power-sharing.

I encourage you to check out the blog about this work here.

Genuine Collaborations: A Variety of Perspective

In this work, however, there is a dearth of documented knowledge - a term we use to refer to any means of cultivating knowledge from communities on a specific matter - on the equitable practice of power-sharing between youth and adults in artistic, cultural, and creative learning environments. So, we got to work and focused on the topic of Genuine Collaborations as part of our 2023 Campaign: Intergenerational Collaborations. 

You can read the full series here, but I’d like to highlight some of the emerging trends from the thinking on the topic.

Genuine collaborations are built on a foundation of trust; trust emerges from co-created responsiveness.

In our collaborations, we must intentionally understand, investigate and approach our roles, as youth, adult, educator, learner, and more. 

Engaging in critical reflection - and there are numerous strategies to do this - provides a pathway for continuous learning to improve future collaborations. 

Exploring perspectives from others provides insights, which can broaden our aperture as we seek to grow in our collaborations. 

My hope in summarizing these - in addition to the spectrum above, and my own stores at the start - is to provide tangible examples, new perspectives, and common language to continue to explore this topic. Because, as we have seen through the variety of perspectives from my colleagues, to effect necessary collaborations (especially between youth and adults) we are always learning and improving for the next collaboration.

Contributing to Distributed Collective Leadership 

One quick note to connect this work to other work that we have written about on the blog prior: I want to relate the topic of genuine collaboration and all of the content within this blog as an enhancement to the dialogues last year about distributed collective leadership. 

Learn more about this concept, in brief, here. 

In my personal opinion, the discourse about genuine collaboration is intrinsic and embedded within the notion of distributed collective leadership. As we pursue the conditions - those four inquiry-based processes of unlearning, bridging, navigating, and holding tensions - for distributed collective leadership, we must consider what has been learned about genuine collaboration:

  • build a foundation of trust; which is co-created in responsiveness;

  • intentionally understand, investigate and approach our roles, as youth, adult, educator, learner, etc;

  • engage in critical reflection to provide a pathway for continuous learning; and

  • explore perspectives from others provides insights, which can broaden our aperture as we seek to grow in our collaborations.