WHY IS LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT A CORE PRINCIPLE AND

PROCESS IN YOUTHBUILD PROGRAMS?

Dorothy Stoneman, written in the nineties for a presentation to YouthBuild

Directors; updated in 2010

We emphasize leadership development in YouthBuild for four reasons:

1) The future of our society and all our communities depends on having
more ethical and effective leaders. No real community development in
low income communities will take place without leadership development.
Furthermore, the society as a whole desperately needs to hear the voice
and feel the leadership of informed, organized, experienced poor people
calling for new ways of living together and organizing society.
2) Every youth program and school would itself be improved if governed
with real input from young people.
3) Leadership can engage young people intensely and deeply, liberating
their own best energies.
4) Real decision-making responsibility can help heal two deep wounds of
young people:
• Low self-esteem due to consistent invalidation of their intelligence; and
• Feelings of powerlessness, and the companion anger, due to being raised
in a thoroughly adult-dominated world, which has not listened to the
ideas of young people.

Leadership development, the way we aim to practice it, is part of the

antidote to the oppression of low income young people. It is a liberating
process, that releases tremendous positive energy.

Unleashing the positive energy and intelligence of young people to rebuild

their communities and their lives is part of our mission. To unleash it
requires reversing the dynamics that have suppressed, depressed, or hidden
it. Dis-respect is always central to the suppression of positive energy.

Respect, profound respect for the intelligence of young people, is one-fifth

of the liberating potion.

The other four-fifths are: love from mentors and peers; opportunities to learn
and grow through experience; discipline to achieve one’s goals; and
participation in something larger than oneself that one can believe in and
belong to that has goals one wants to identify with.

Human beings have the unique abilities to think, to love, to visualize the
world as we want it to be and then create it. In other words, to lead. To
think, to love, to create, to lead.

We live in an oppressive class society in which the abilities of most people

to think, to love, to create, and to lead are diminished by surrounding
constraints, shortages, and attitudes.

We need to think of YouthBuild as a liberation process. And think of the

YouthBuild movement as a liberated oasis, where people are treated the way
they’re supposed to be. where intelligence, love, and leadership are nurtured,
brought forth, where the obstacles to exercising them are removed.

Our concept and our language affects how we approach our work.

We are not servicing clients in YouthBuild. We are not taking young people
off the streets. We are not saving young people or even transforming their
lives. They will tell you every time, once they have found their voice, “You
are not transforming our lives; we are transforming our own lives, we have
to do it, you are just giving us the opportunity, and we thank you for that,
but don’t make us sound like passive recipients of service.”

Every step of leadership development and liberation is a partnership. When

they enter the program, most of the young people in YouthBuild could not
actually transform their lives or change the world without us, because they
do not arrive with the power, the resources, the experience, the confidence,
and sometimes the vision of what is possible. If they did, they would
already be doing it. It is our job to lend our power, resources, experience,
confidence, and vision to them, so they can use the opportunity to vault over
obstacles.

I am reminded of Anthony Turner, a YAPH YouthBuild graduate who said,

“Yes, I guess YouthBuild is a stepping stone.. . but I think of it more as a
trampoline… it has vaulted me over so many obstacles.” (Anthony Turner
is now deceased, having died of cancer in 2009. Before his death he told me
with great emotion, “I am grateful to YouthBuild because it gave me ten
more years of life than I expected to have, and allowed me to leave a
beautiful family behind.)

After ten years of running the Youth Action Program, I stopped to write a
book that summarized and pulled the principles of youth leadership
development out of that experience. That book is the Leadership
Development Handbook that we distribute through YouthBuild USA. How
many of you have ever read it? How many of you have read it in the last
two years? Sometimes it helps to re-read something – you learn something
different at different periods.

I urge you to read it, because it still stands as my best summary of how to do
it.

It describes in some detail seven aspects of youth leadership development.

• Counteracting the effects of oppression

• Nurturing individuals
• Teaching leadership skills
• Inviting participation in real decision-making and project implementation
• Challenging bad habits, personal hang-ups and skill deficiencies
• Creating situations in which young people experience success
• Organizing together to change the world

In counteracting the limiting effects of oppression, it helps to surprise young

people. Give them way more voice than they ever expected. Listen to their
ideas and help them implement them. Let them assist in hiring staff, in
reviewing the budget, in setting policies. Set it up so they say, “Wow! This
is truly different! They respect us here; they care what we think; they trust
our ability.”

This, of course, is where it gets controversial. You will hear many

arguments against it. For example, the arguments go something like this:

“They are Not Ready. They have made bad decisions in their own lives; I’m
not going to let them make bad decisions that could ruin the program. If
they were ready to govern the program, they wouldn’t be here.…Their focus
has got to be on mastering their own self-destructive patterns…leadership is
a distracting illusion…
“It’s not reality…I don’t want to mislead them… We pump them up, the
world knocks them down… or we create monsters who think they’re entitled
to govern when they haven’t earned it… it’s a form of liberalism that is
damaging in the long run.

“Their problem is no discipline… no self-discipline… they have to submit to

other people’s discipline as part of facing reality, and gradually internalize
their own discipline. Their problem is that nobody has ever set limits…they
need limits set by someone they know cares about them.

“Increasing responsibility and leadership is earned, step by step, through

repeated and continual small responsible steps, taking actions which benefit
oneself and the group… There’s no benefector who bestows magical power
on irresponsible people, nor should there be.

“They have to get there on time and pick up their tools 100 times before I’ll
ask them how they think we should organize ourselves to get the job done.”

I am not quoting these arguments to belittle them. They have to be

considered. There is some truth in all of this…We do have to blend a mix of
surprising and exciting and challenging respect and inclusion that totally
startles them into engaging their intelligence in solving real problems….and
we also have to teach that over time self-discipline and responsibility rule…
that doing the hard thing when you don’t feel like it will get you where you
want to go.

We also have to invite THEM to set some of these goals and guidelines.
They have extremely high standards underneath their cynicism, and they will
be the first to set higher standards for staff and trainees than we dare set.

Youth involvement in decision-making doesn’t mean deciding what food to

serve at the party…it’s not about giving them influence over how their peers
are entertained or punished. That is traditionally the realm in which adults
allow young people to make decisions.

Some of the most exciting times of my life have been when I invited the
young people in to make the most difficult decisions with the farthest
reaching implications. Here’s an example…
One day in 1980 when I was director of Youth Action Program, we got a
call from the State Department of Social Services in New York. The caller
said, “Your proposal is one of the best in the State. But you have a political
problem, and we can’t fund you unless you solve that problem. Your state
assemblyman does not want to fund you, and he is the chairman of the state
social services committee. He thinks that we should fund instead the
program run by his brother. We suggest you do something to align
yourselves more closely with him. For example, you could put one of his
family or associates on your board of directors. That could solve your
political problem.”

We could have just quietly done that, behind the scenes. But instead we
called the core group of about 30 young people and 5 staff to a meeting
behind closed doors, in what we called “the hot room” because it had no air
and was overheated. It was behind metal doors where nobody could hear us.

I presented the situation to the group and asked what they thought we should
do. Ideas flew. One senior staff member said he thought we should do what
the State had suggested. After all, that was how the game was played. If we
needed to put one of them on our board, we should, in order to serve the
community. John Sainz, a fifteen year old who had been with us for a year
or two, stood up. He said, “If you do that, if you sell us out, if you let them
bully us and control us after you have taught us to live according to our
principles and stand up for what we believe in, you will never see me in this
building again.” Tears were streaming down his face. It was a pivotal
moment in our organizational development and in my awareness of how
powerful it is to teach integrity to young people who are hungry for leaders
they can trust.

We did not put any of their cronies on our board. Instead, we hammered out
our principles for four hours in the “hot room”. One principle was to “walk
softly and carry a big stick,” translated to mean: speak respectfully, but have
a very large constituency behind us.

We organized carefully for a long struggle in which we effectively

neutralized the opposition of these politicians and gained the funding for our
program. In the end, ten years later, one of the young people who had been
in the “hot room” that night defeated the Assemblyman’s brother in an
election. How we waged our successful struggle is a long story for a
different speech. The fact that we did it is testimony to the importance of
bringing the young people in to consider the most difficult and interesting
questions facing the organization.

One day Gregg Scott came into my office and said, “OK, let’s talk about
what you really mean about leadership development and what you really
expect. Do you really expect every YouthBuild graduate to become a leader
in the community?” So we talked. And after an hour discovered that we
agreed thoroughly.

Neither one of us imagined that all YouthBuild students will become

leaders. But we believed that if we give them the chance, some of them will.
And all of them will do better because some of them will. And all of them
will move further on the continuum of responsibility than they otherwise
would, because you put out the expectation and invitation … people do rise
toward the level of expectation…

And all of them will internalize the value system of taking responsibility to
make things go right for oneself, one’s family, and community.

Ron Ferguson, who has done the research on YouthBuild’s transformation

process, once said, “If you could just get the directors who don’t believe the
young people are ready for leadership, to think about how when a baby is
born everyone starts talking to him even though he doesn’t understand the
language, so that when he is ready to talk, he knows the language of his
parents. Leadership concepts are like that. If the program is talking the
language and values of leadership, when the new recruits have gone through
their process of testing the program and themselves, and are ready to buy in,
they will already know the language of leadership.”

Now suppose that only a handful of students get the fire in the belly and
have the discipline to become leaders. What if only 10% - 3 out of 30 -
catch it. Well, imagine…. Over three years you have nine. Nine people can
change a community. If your alumni are organized, and there are nine of
them determined to be the source of improvements, they can make an
enormous difference. Margaret Meade once said, “Don’t ever imagine that
a small group of people figuring out how to improve the world can’t
succeed… in fact, nothing else ever does.”

Every individual who “gets it” is gold for our communities.

Now, there will be lots of students whose brilliance is never, at least during
the time you know them, going to be matched with discipline and skill.
They will be most useful as a member of a committee, contributing ideas,
not as an implementer or leader or manager. That’s OK, too. Our job is to
find ways for people to shine where they can, for their intelligence and
caring to be valuable at whatever level they are ready.

And some of your students may not get it together for as long as you know
them, but the seed you plant may blossom later. Our founding board chair,
Leroy Looper, is my favorite example of this. He went to reform school at
age eight, for stealing pocketbooks. He spent most of his youth in reform
school. In that school was a nice teacher named Mr. Orange. Mr. Orange
noticed that Leroy was bright. He taught him to read and brought him books
from home to read. When Leroy was older, in the penitentiary, he continued
to read everything he could get his hands on. By the time he finally changed
his life and became a positive force in the community, at age 39, he was a
well-read man. Now, 65 years later, partly because of Mr. Orange, Leroy
has spent 30 years giving back, creating and leading superb programs for ex-
offenders, addicts, people with mental illness, aides patients, and youth. A
few years ago he was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree. Mr.
Orange never had any idea that that little boy in reform school had grown up
to feel grateful to him for giving him the essential tool for his later
transformation. You just never know where your YouthBuild students will
end up and what precious learning they are taking from you.

In a more recent example, I got a phone call from Craig Burton in March of
2010. Craig had been on the National Alumni Council in the nineties and
graduated from YouthBuild St. Louis early on. He said, “Dorothy, I am
turning 37 next week, and I am calling after not being in touch for ten years
to tell you that I am happily married, have a good job in a non-profit, but
that my life was never more fulfilling, and I never learned so much from
more people about how to live a meaningful life, than the time I spent in a
leadership role for YouthBuild. I would like to get back involved… is there
a way that I can plug in and help spread these opportunities?” We talked for
45 minutes in which he described many many moments of learning, and
people who taught him – YouthBuild staff members Elijah Etheridge, Daryl
Wright, Gregg Scott, John Bell, Kevin Tarpley, and me, among others!

So the young people whom you can see have caught the fire in their belly
and internalized the values of service and leadership… you must not let
them disappear into no man’s land. We need them. Their communities need
them. The world needs them. Stay in touch with them and continue to find
ever-more-challenging opportunities for them to contribute and lead.