Have you ever noticed that when adults speak positively of young people it is almost always in the future tense? ‘She has great leadership potential.’ ‘He will be quite a force, if he finds a good mentor.’ We say children are the future. We ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. We tell teenagers they will make a difference one day. Yet, their efforts to impact their communities right now are often met with resistance. Young leaders challenge the misperception that leadership has a minimum age requirement. We need to support youth in shattering that misguided notion, not just for their benefit, but for our own.
Two themes have consistently emerged in my work with youth over the past twenty years. First, young people are talented and creative leaders. Second, we do far too little to engage their strengths in the present tense. Typically adults are either so focused on young people’s future or dismissive of their ideas as naïve that we overlook their capacity to be positive forces in our world now. We are often misled by a false logic that youth is a limiting factor of leadership capacity.
The ripple effect of this logic is significant, and we repeatedly miss opportunities to learn from young people’s ingenuity, as a result. Because we perceive a minimum leadership age and know that age cannot be accelerated, there is no reason to design youth institutions or programs to recognize any preexisting capacity to lead and innovate. Therefore, those we have created focus exclusively on teaching and practice. We ask youth to keep coming to practice, but we never put any real games on their schedule. We put them through simulations but never let them step into the arena to battle real opponents, because we do not believe they are old enough to play. In fact, we see no reason to build an arena at all. When we presume that youth severely limits one’s capacity to contribute, there is no need to create genuine opportunities to listen to and be inspired by their ideas or build frameworks that facilitate implementing them.
Yet, despite a lack of formal support, the world is full of examples of young people demonstrating their aptitude for influential leadership. Greta Thunburg was 15 when she conducted her first climate strike. She wanted to act now to preserve her future, but ironically her school was only built to prepare her to act later. Her solution was to leave school and sit alone on the steps of the Swedish Parliament to ask adults, one by one, to act on behalf of her future. Most of her country’s leaders dismissed her. She persisted. A year later, an estimated 7.5 million people in 185 countries joined Greta on steps and streets worldwide, and the leaders of the world invited her into the United Nations to hear her speak.
Malala Yousafzai was 11 when she began advocating for the rights of girls to attend school in Pakistan. She was 15 when the Taliban boarded her school bus and shot her in the face in an effort to silence her. She survived. She was 17 when she became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize because that bullet meant to silence her only emboldened her to fight harder for a girl’s right to learn.
William Kamkwamba was 14 when he was forced to drop out of school because famine in Malawi left his family unable to pay for school fees. He used plans he found in borrowed textbooks to build a power generating windmill from scraps. Despite facing obstacles, skepticism and ridicule, he succeeded. His windmill garnered worldwide attention allowing him to finish school and continue innovating. His projects have now helped provide health care, electricity, irrigation and clean water in his village and beyond.
If a 15-year-old’s persistence can start a global movement, an 11-year-old’s resolve and courage can bring education to thousands of young girls and the ingenuity of a 14-year-old can bring water to a village in the midst of famine in arenas designed to dismiss and resist them, imagine what our world could be if we started fighting alongside youth instead of around them or against them. Imagine what millions of young people the world over would do if we built arenas designed to invite and showcase their contributions to our team as soon as possible. That is a team I would be honored to be a part of and a game day that cannot arrive too soon.
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