This article is #2 in our Youth Engagement series. This series focuses on the role of young people in engagement processes and their place in the present and future of deliberative democracy. Look out for more content on this topic over the next few months.
Ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community.
Community engagement is often specific – about a particular community or about a place. In many Council planning projects, we tend to ask the question:
What do you want to see for your community or council area in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years?
This question - of course - means something different to each person depending on their relationship to the place. What then, does it mean for the young people we seek to engage?
youth and long-term visions
This dilemma came to me a number of weeks ago in a workshop with residents of a particular Council. They were asked the question – what do you want to see in your community in 10 to 20 years?
After the activity, a young participant reflected back to the group that it was hard to answer the question because he had no idea where he’d be living next year, let alone in 10 to 20 years time. He couldn’t relate to the future of this place in the same way other older participants could – those who had strong roots in this area and called it home in the past, present and future.
The transient nature of young adults
The reality, this young person revealed, is indeed a trend - data from the 2016 census suggests that ‘one third of young Australians aged 20 to 29 change address every 12 months and two thirds move every five years’. I know this to be true personally too – my friends and I occupy the 23-26 age range, and tend to move once a year, often to a different part of the city. It’s difficult to imagine where any of us might settle in even 5 years’ time.
The question of engagement around a long-term vision for a particular place seems, at least on the surface, to be quite irrelevant for a young person. Young people are being asked – rightly so – to imagine a future in a place they don’t necessarily plan to plant roots in.
The challenge for young people becomes:
How do I answer these questions if I do not necessarily see myself living in this place in the future, near or far?
How can I position my voice as one that is important in a conversation that feels like it does not relate to me?
Methods for including young people
There needs to be a way to include young people in conversations about the long-term vision of a community. I believe the answer to this lies in the framing of the participation itself.
To do this, we need to shift the perspective from a responsibility to ‘place’ - to a responsibility to ‘peers’. While aspirations suggested by young people today might not be directly inherited by them in the future, they will certainly be inherited by other young people, and to them we have a direct responsibility.
The participation of transient young people in these deliberative planning processes therefore becomes a matter of ‘ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community’, to appropriate the famous J.F.K quote. Young people may not feel driven to participate based on the potential of securing a certain future for themselves directly, but they can and should be motivated by the potential benefit they can create for future generations and/or fellow citizens.
Benefits of including young people in these conversations
Finding a way to involve young people in these conversations provides a meaningful way to represent the progressive ideas most commonly held by the younger members of our communities - particularly pertaining to issues such as education, employment, mental health and, most notably, climate change. It may be important to a young person to be a representative of those ideas and perspectives regardless of whether they see a particular benefit to themselves as residents.
At an individual level - for young people - being part of a deliberative process can teach them a great amount about collaboration, critical thinking and decision making. It teaches them about the general processes of change-making at a local community level, as well as a myriad of transferable skills.
Ultimately, participation in these deliberative processes is an act of collective civic responsibility. For young people, despite their potential lack of long-term affiliation to a particular area, this essence should generate a desire to offer time and energy to improving the future of our communities.
Noa Levin
What this means for facilitators
In practice, as facilitators, we should be reflecting on these ideas when:
inviting participants to be involved in collective community decision making
framing the questions during the process itself.
Afterall, involving young people in deliberations benefits the whole community. Widening the scope of participation from ‘me’ to ‘we’ can heighten the meaning of participation for those involved, as well as ultimately delivering better outcomes for the community in the future.
This series of articles explores the importance of involving young people meaningfully in community engagement.
Please follow us while we ruminate on this topic – unpacking case studies, exploring options and understanding this form of engagement better - over 2021.
Noa is the youngest member of the MosaicLab team at 23. She has spent many years involved in youth organisations, working with her peers to cultivate strong youth leadership and advocacy with a focus on informal education.
More about Noa
Learn more about Noa and read her bio here.ENJOYED THIS POST?
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