Through its two-year Intergenerational Learning Collaborative, the Foundation worked with four organizations, youth and adult leaders and technical assistance partners to explore how organizations can strengthen shared leadership and decision making across generations.
The collaborative identified seven core insights and six core practices that offer field-tested guidance for building authentic, sustainable intergenerational partnerships. The insights highlight common organizational barriers, relationship dynamics and challenges to shared leadership. The practices provide actionable strategies for strengthening youth-adult collaboration, improving organizational systems and creating more equitable opportunities for young people and adults to lead together.
The seven Core Insights highlight common challenges and lessons learned from the Intergenerational Learning Collaborative. Review the summary below, then visit the dedicated Core Insights page for a deeper look at each insight, including key lessons and considerations for organizations.
Youth engagement grows strongest when young people shape budgets, redesign curricula, participate in hiring and co-facilitate key conversations.
Many organizations enter the work with strong values yet lack the systems, staffing structures and processes needed to operationalize those values.
Adults in established roles often struggle with conflict, feedback, shared facilitation and stepping away from long-held assumptions about authority.
Intergenerational principles must be translated into step-by-step processes across daily operations to prevent defaulting to traditional norms.
Youth and adults have different experiences of time and urgency, requiring shared timeline planning and transparency about constraints.
Organizations advance, pause, reverse and advance again; cyclical development is the nature of intergenerational partnership.
Without strong systems, youth cannot lead. Without strong relationships, adults may not trust the process of change.
The six Core Practices offer concrete ways to strengthen youth-adult partnerships. Review the summary below, then visit the dedicated Core Practices page for detailed recommendations to help your organization put these approaches into action.
Pay young people reliably and transparently to affirm them as legitimate contributors rather than secondary participants.
Create explicit shared norms to prevent groups from defaulting to existing hierarchies or individual habits.
Build intentional pathways that expand access and support long-term youth growth and institutional memory.
Equip teams to safely identify and resolve tensions rather than avoiding conflict, which reinforces hierarchy.
Redesign meeting structures, pacing and language to actively enable youth influence.
Track structural shifts in decision making and using data to drive continuous learning and accountability.
Is Your Organization Ready for Shared Leadership?
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