Subscribe Feed (RSS)Creating a Structure for Youth Participation
October 2nd, 2007 by mas | Filed under Participation & Citizenship.
At our meeting this weekend one of the things we looked at was our working practices as an organisation - including how we’re structured and how our members (including young people) can participate in our ‘governance’.
YoMo has a Board of Directors and a committee. The Committee has become a charity (The YoMo Foundation). The Charity and the Company are independent organisations with different people responsible for the running of them. We also have some people who are involved but are not Trustees of the charity or Directors of the company but are still important to us. Confused?! Then you’ll understand why we’ve been discussing this for nearly 2 years!!
In practice things are very simple - everyone interested meets up, we chat about whats going on and new ideas, divide up who’s doing what and go away and do it.
It becomes complex because legally the company has to have Directors and the charity has to have Trustees. Because we’re not incorporated (and don’t want to be) the charity and the company are different legal bodies. This is ok too because the company and charity each have different responsibilities. The complications are because there are people who are neither trustees or directors but we want to involve them in decision making.
There are all sorts of ways of achieving this but we wanted to set up a structure thats easy to understand and easy to explain for new people to become involved with us. We also want to try and avoid taking up too much of peoples (mostly volunteers) time which would be easily done if we needed to have trustees meetings, directors meetings, committee meetings + the day to day stuff various people do with us.
The original structure is straightforward and is the sort of thing many organisations use. Its also hierarchical and presents a couple of problems. The first issue is it makes it very difficult to explain how members can be involved in anything other than a tokenistic way - they are always going to be a ‘committee’ or an ‘advisory group’ with no actual power and a feeling of having to ‘bow down’ top those who have. The other is perhaps more personal to me which is that I don’t like hierarchical structures - I believe leadership is important but I think a hierarchy restricts people lower down the ladder from effectively leading, there’s a tendency instead for people to do as they’re told! (and arguably for people higher up to feel they can boss people about).
The ‘power’ issue is difficult because in our governing documents (and legally) the true power lies with the Directors and Trustees. But we do and always have taken everyone’s views seriously - so how can we structure ourselves in a way that acknowledges our legal status but also gives everyone a sense of being valued.
I think what we came up with is very interesting and could easily be transferred to lots of organisations seeking to involve young people in governance. We’ve removed the ‘boards’ and instead adapted what we’re calling a ‘circle of accountability’. The principle is that rather than people being accountable to the ‘boards’ they are instead accountable to the purpose.
In our case the purpose is that we want to ‘build the capacity of young people to effectively participate in society’. Therefore when we meet we will all meet to discuss how we’re doing towards furthering that aim (or how we’re obstructing it!).
An interesting aspect of this accountability is that its not just people with titles like Director or Trustee that are accountable - so are ordinary members (mostly young people). So for example we may have a responsibility to support young people to participate in our events but so too do young people have a responsibility to take advantage of these opportunities.
Of course really this is just pictures and words rearranged on paper - it doesn’t change legal status. But what it does do I think is provides a more accurate picture of how we actually work.
In terms of adopting something similar for other organisations heres an example:
So rather than being concerned with ‘getting some young people on the committee’, the emphasis is on getting together various people to meet equally and be accountable to a common goal. This is pretty much how we approach our training too - we help groups of young people and adults develop projects they are equally involved with. Of course there’s potential for misuse of this too - this sort of model shouldn’t be an excuse not to involve young people in the various individual bodies but what it does well I think is provides a means for involvement for young people that don’t want the perceived burdens/complications of being a ‘committee member’ but do want to contribute to decisions.
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