After attending a youth engagement seminar hosted by United Way, there was a collective decision by the OYN crew that our project was not being true to its youth-led mantra. At the moment the Advisory Committee is the only avenue for people to get involved, and the average age of its members is above 20, while this project is meant to target youth between the ages 13 to 24. We need to formulate a youth engagement strategy as soon as possible. To help us do this, we had a meeting with Ratsamy Pathammavong who works for the Lung Association mobilizing youth around health issues through the YATI (Youth Advocacy Training Institute). She has an amazing energy and a few of her nuggets of wisdom were as follows:

• Be very clear about what are the youth-led areas of this project, and what spaces youth have to make decisions about the project
• Avoid making false promises to youth and others
• Notify people about limitations due to budget, funding requirements, management, proposal constraints…etc
• Concrete suggestions regarding youth voice on the AC include:

o Having youth chair meetings
o Having a 50% youth quorum
o Using “dotmocracy” as a non-verbal way of getting people’s opinions about issues
o 2:1 voting status (youth:adults)


Another resource at our disposal was the Council of Agencies Serving South Asians (CASSA) publication “Leading by Example: Youth Leadership in Non-Profit Governance” written by Soni Dasmohapatra and Beenash Jafri. We found the most useful parts of this guide to be “CASSA’s Principles of Youth Engagement” and the  South Asian Youth Advisory Committee (SAYAC) “Terms of Reference”. The “Principles” are the philosophical backbone of CASSA’s approach to youth engagement within the organization, and the SAYAC “Terms of Reference” are useful to us as a model upon revision of our own Advisory Committee’s Terms of Reference.

Updates will come soon regarding what direction the OYN decides to take after digesting this information. If you have any useful links/resources/suggestions, please leave us comments below or email us at youth-jeunesse@ocasi.org

An awesome resource we have found is a “Youth Friendly” guide by Apathy is Boring which has an awesome section on “How to Make A Meeting Real to Youth” and info on how to make your organization more youth-friendly. It can be found here.