Seen and Heard: Learning from Young People's Experiences Sharing Power in Faith Communities

Faith communities have been shown to provide a sense of belonging and community while also providing a rich environment for youth to engage and grow as leaders. Yet, few current studies have explored faith communities as spaces for sharing power and sustained youth leadership development. Using a thematic analysis approach, this qualitative study of 222 participants across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faith communities aimed to explore the role of developmental relationships in young people's lives and their faith and spiritual development. Through the analyses, multiple and varied examples of sharing power emerged, leading us to investigate more fully the roles of leadership, engagement, and participation in young people's experiences in their faith communities. Findings demonstrated that faith communities can provide welcoming, engaging spaces for youth to have voice and develop as leaders. Youth across faith communities experienced authentic opportunities to build and apply leadership skills. These experiences led to positive youth outcomes, including increased confidence, building relational skills, feelings of belonging, and greater engagement. Findings from this study can inform youth development programs more broadly by illuminating concrete ways adults and youth can share power, leading to young people’s sense of engagement and belonging.

Leading or led? A critical exploration of youth leadership development

Leadership development for youth is an increasingly large global business that has to date lacked sustained critical scrutiny. Our inquiry is based on application, interview and reflection data from participants in a university-based leadership programme, capturing them at the point they transition to early work lives. We argue that leadership has become such a prevalent career and work discourse that the leadership development that happens in youth offers a unique window into new organisational workers, the leadership development industry and a complex leadership theoretical terrain. A set of five ‘leading’ discourses – separate, suspended, small, self and semi – were identified that invite critical inquiry. While youth leadership scholars have previously noted the suspended and separate discourses, we empirically refine those and offer the other three (small, self and semi) as important to current contestations between leaders, leadership and leadership development. In doing so, we question whether current leadership development for youth creates substantive leadership capacity in individuals, organisations or society.

Building the capacity for student leadership in high school: a review of organizational mechanisms from the field of student voice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the organizational mechanisms by which schools can increase opportunities for student leadership.Design/methodology/approachA review of the student voice literature conducted in high schools was used to identify organizational mechanisms for enhancing student leadership.FindingsFive leadership-fostering organizational mechanisms were identified: consistency, research, group makeup, governance structure and recognition.Originality/valueThis paper examines the existing body of student voice research to identify organizational mechanisms for fostering student leadership in schools. Researchers can use this to operationalize student leadership mechanisms and study their impact. Practitioners can implement these mechanisms in schools to support youth leadership development.

Queer counterpoints: Making ‘mistakes’ in loveLife’s ‘Make Your Move’

Drawing upon queer theory and Said’s notion of the counterpoint, the article analyses the launch episode of a reality television series produced by the South African NGO loveLife, which focused on a young, self-identified lesbian woman in Soweto. We offer a counter example to discourses of the powerless victimhood of Black, gender and sexually non-normative individuals in South African townships. We unveil contrapuntally the pushes and pulls between the voice of the authoritative facilitator, aligned with loveLife’s HIV-prevention and youth leadership development methodology, and that of the young woman herself, who volunteered for the intervention, focusing on their disagreement on how best to ‘accommodate’ the prevailing social norms of contemporary South Africa. We also discuss the counterpoint between us – a discourse analyst observing the effects of particular articulations on South African society related to loveLife’s social aims, and the producer of the episode, charged with the protection of the NGO’s brand identity. We conclude that norms governing gender and sexuality in a rapidly evolving society such as South Africa’s are best understood as presenting analysis with dilemmas and contradictions, and that contrapuntal reading is a valuable tool for bringing these tensions under scrutiny without succumbing to the urge to resolve them.

Filling OpenStreetMap data gaps in rural Nepal: a digital youth internship and leadership Programme

Crowdsourced, open geospatial data such as the data compiled through OpenStreetMap have proven useful in addressing humanitarian, disaster and development needs. However, the existing ways in which volunteers engage in OpenStreetMap have inherent limitations that lead to critical data gaps in economically underdeveloped countries and regions. Various initiatives that target specific geospatial data gaps and engage volunteers for longer periods have emerged to overcome these limitations, yet there has been limited in-depth study of such targeted mapping initiatives. This article reports the findings from Digital Internship and Leadership (DIAL), a programme designed to fill data gaps in rural Nepal by engaging young people in mapping rural Nepal by integrating targeted mapping, a virtual internship strategy and youth leadership development. The findings suggest the potential benefits of targeted mapping initiatives embedded in youth leadership internship programmes to address those critical data gaps.

Youth Leadership Development in the Start2Finish Running & Reading Club

Researchers have asserted that offering intentional leadership roles to youth can help them to develop life skills (e.g., communication, decision-making); however, few physical-activity-based positive youth development programs provide youth these intentional leadership roles, and little research has explored the impact of these opportunities on youth who take them up. The purpose of this study was to understand the developmental experiences of youth leaders in a physical-activity-based positive youth development program. Sixteen youth leaders (Mage= 13.37, SD = 1.36) from 4 sites of the Start2Finish Running & Reading Club participated in semi-structured interviews to discuss their experiences as junior coaches. Fertman and van Linden’s (1999) model of youth leadership development was used to guide the data collection and analysis. Through deductive-inductive thematic analysis, 3 themes were constructed: (a) awareness: developing into leaders started with seeing potential through role models, (b) interaction: learning by doing and interacting with others helped youth to practice leadership abilities, and (c) mastery: taking on greater responsibility allowed for opportunities to refine leadership abilities and develop a variety of life skills. These themes helped to bring an understanding to the processes involved in leadership and life-skill development. Practical and research implications are discussed regarding leveraging youth leadership opportunities in youth programming.