The Students Speak Youth Leadership Team (YLT) provides young people the opportunity to participate in making decisions and setting the direction of Students Speak’s advocacy agenda with the guidance and mentorship of adult allies.
The YLT is currently comprised of 14 Youth Leaders who hail from towns throughout Massachusetts, including Haverhill, Amesbury, Brockton, Chelsea, Lowell, and Springfield. Meet the members below.
Youth Leaders work closely with one another and their adult allies to design programming they then co-facilitate with groups of their peers. This programming focuses on 1) developing young people’s advocacy skills and 2) learning together about the issues young people encounter in their schools. The overarching goal is to foster a growing youth movement for improving schools through prioritizing the inclusion of student voice in school-based decision making.
Youth Leaders help their peers see how the barriers they experience in their local schools are similar to the barriers students experience across Massachusetts. They also support their peers to analyze and understand the systemic conditions that create barriers to learning and brainstorm advocacy actions to address these conditions.
Specifically, Youth Leaders engage in the following work:
The Students Speak Youth Leadership Team (YLT) is established with 5 members, representing the communities of Brockton, Lowell, and the greater Springfield. The YLT works to envision an advocacy agenda around increasing student voice in educational decision-making.
The first YLT day-long retreat was held at Harvard Law School. The young people, their youth program advisors, mentors and staff from Students Speak spent the day engaging in activities designed to build community, begin advocacy and leadership skill building, and engage in deeper discussions about issues the young people are concerned about.
YLT members met together as a whole group biweekly on Zoom. These meetings focused on continuing to grow the sense of community among the young people and supporting them to grow in leadership and advocacy skills. The YLT began gathering data for an advocacy agenda through interviewing their peers to learn more about their school experiences.
By the end of the Fall semester, the young people engaged in deep learning about the skills of listening to connect, listening to learn, developing an introductory “pitch” describing the purpose of Students Speak, recording notes, developing interview questions, and conducting peer interviews.
The YLT membership grew to number 14 and includes young people from the other three programs with whom Students Speak partners: Amesbury Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, Haverhill Boys and Girls Club, and Chelsea REACH.
Held a second day-long retreat which included welcoming new members, building community and beginning to develop consensus around an advocacy agenda based on the issues identified through interviews with their peers.
YLT members hone their skills as they prepare for the Youth Summit by addressing with their program peers the following questions: How could student voice address some of the root causes of issues we have identified? and How can we best describe the current reality (positive and negative) of student voice in our schools?
YLT members led their peers in activities throughout the day to an audience of 55 young people from across MA who engaged in a variety of hands-on activities designed build connections and collective power to amplify student voice. A final activity facilitated all 55 attendees to enthusiastically engage in voting to reach consensus about what bills to prioritize in future advocacy.
