Who’s the Youth: Exploring Genuine Intergenerational Collaboration

BY CAMEA DAVIS

Interesting fact: In many places around the world, an individual can be considered a ‘youth’ until age 24 or even 32! By these terms, I just became an adult, so now, I’m questioning what is genuine intergenerational collaboration in the youth development space?

I think it means negotiating an authentic shared power between folks on an intergenerational team. 

When adults invite youth into a collaboration, there must be some pre-work done to establish shared leadership, ownership, and position everyone as a learner. Similarly, when youth invite adults into a space there usually needs to be some context setting, shared meaning making of terms and processes so that adults can engage as collaborators. 

Both are really challenging to do. Yet, without these elements, “youth voice” becomes an elusive metaphor that oftentimes manifests as youth being propped up for performative moments of sharing in an isolated slot while adults curate the structures of the so-called intergenerational collaboration.  

Collaborating With Youth

One place where I collaborated with youth organizers was as the Director of the National Youth Poet Laureate Program during our planning for a series of workshops that would occur in the spring of 2021. 

Amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, the fight for Black Lives, and immediately following the murder of six Asian women in three spas in Atlanta, GA, four young women poets and I were co-planning a virtual workshop series that would open the nations Youth Poet Laureates. In the day-to-day administrative duties of managing the program and logistics, I was a bit disconnected from the urgent needs of the youth I served. However, the young women co-planning this series had very clear visions on how to proceed. 

These young women poets identified as African American, Vietnamese American, and Chinese American immigrants. The social issues in the spring of 2021 were close to their communities and they wanted to provide space to respond. I made the budget and general logistic parameters for the workshop series. The youth lead the planning and facilitation of the workshops. They decided to plan workshops that explored a cross-racial collaboration between Black American women and Asian American women using a feminist lens. They identified activists working on these themes and invited them to present, created their own poems to share during the workshop, and co-facilitated the series with me. 

What Worked

The thing that made this intergenerational collaboration work was inviting in each of our unique gifts and having the power in the collaboration to make the necessary moves. While I am deeply versed in pedagogy and facilitation moves, it was important that the youth leaders be given autonomy to shape the space, content, and the outcomes of our collaboratively planned workshop series. I added my thinking around what could work here or there and met with them to sharpen any ideas. Yet, they were the ones leading. 

Adults working to conduct intergenerational collaboration with youth need to allow youth to access their own power and agency in any work they do. This means being present, available, and active as a resource to them yet not dictating the project. This is especially important if the adult has apprehensions, risks, or other institutional constraints youth may not be considering. 

In a different intergenerational collaborative effort, supporting young activists to make the organizational change they wanted, I had to delicately navigate supporting youth to see the organizational constraints and intersecting levers of injustice they were attempting to combat yet in other ways reifying. It is significant that work and life experience tend to afford older people a bit more perspective and context that youth may not have. Yet youth’s ideas and agency must be honored even when adults are not willing to risk what’s requested or are unable to do so. Still there needs to be a genuine collaboration. 

Key Considerations

The key thing I learned here is genuine intergenerational collaboration requires a lot of intentional time listening and sharing across the generational lines. Sharing/reading/listening to grounding content is also helpful. Lowering all egos and acknowledging that collaboration is a messy process that does not always neatly accomplish a goal within a finite timeline. 

Some key considerations for folks seeking genuine intergenerational collaboration are: 

  • What will the adults gain? Does this matter to them? 

  • What will the youth gain? Does this matter to them? 

  • What must each group risk or compromise in this collaborative process? 

  • How do we collaborate in a liberatory manner? 

  • How will we intentionally disrupt power hoarding and ageism in our collaboration? 

As you seek to engage intergenerational teams please consider these questions individually and collectively prior to beginning your collaboration. Allow the answers to inform what you do and do not do next.