Empowering Youth Voice and Decision-Making

How do we help lift the voices of youth that may have been traditionally silenced or diminished?

How do we prioritize their voices to influence decision-making?

These are questions you may ask yourself when decision-making is not a shared process, when voices are silenced, or when voices are invited but not heard.

Youth have had this experience over the course of the history of the child welfare system. Foster youth provide valuable insight and voice into potential improvements to the structure of child welfare because they have intimately experienced it. It is critical that their voices are heard to improve our system of care.

In the Professional Development Program (PDP) training, “Promoting Positive Youth Development and Well-Being”, participants explore the “Ladder of Participation”. This tool comes from the work of sociologist Roger Hart in his book Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care. Hart provides adult partners with a model that helps ensure  youth voice is not just heard, but that youth share in the decision-making process with adults. The “Ladder of Participation” has eight rungs. The last three rungs represent non-participation in decision-making. The top five rungs represent a movement toward the eighth rung, which prioritizes youth voice and true partnership with adults.

These are the eight rungs of the “Ladder of Participation”:

• Rung 8: Youth & Adults Share Decision-Making
• Rung 7: Youth Lead & Initiate Action
• Rung 6: Adult-Initiated, Shared Decisions with Youth
• Rung 5: Youth Consulted & Informed
• Rung 4: Youth Assigned & Informed
• Rung 3: Youth Tokenized
• Rung 2: Youth are Decoration
• Rung 1: Youth are Manipulated

For more information and support, reach out to the Youth Engagement Specialist (YES) in your region and request the PDP training “Promoting Positive Youth Development and Well-Being” on page four in our course catalog.