The LaunchNW Youth Leadership Council (YLC) isn’t like the rest. Whereas most youth councils are open discussion groups centered around a specific issue, our Youth Leadership Council lets students address the issues they see in their community.
All students in the YLC get paid, and acceptance to the group is by application only. The YLC has a huge amount of influence, too. With a $50,000 budget every year for three years, they leverage their substantial resources with full control over what they choose to fund.
In fact, the only aspect LaunchNW controls outright is the proposal process. It’s designed to encourage critical thinking and research in a way that challenges assumptions, relies on community interfacing, and considers the big picture.
So sure, the resources are there. The critical framework is there. But what else makes the Youth Leadership Council a worthwhile pursuit for our students and the community as a whole? To answer this question, I spoke with Iona Cairncross, Community and Youth Engagement Program Manager at LaunchNW.
SAMUEL MCLAUGHLIN: What has you excited about the Youth Leadership Council so far?
IONA CAIRNCROSS: We’re almost finished with interviews, and it’s been interesting; overwhelmingly, our applicants identified substance abuse as one of the biggest challenges facing Spokane County youth today. There’s power in youth voice of actually knowing what their own experiences are and those of the folks they live alongside in the community.
A goal of ours with the Youth Leadership Council is to celebrate and highlight folks whose voices are not heard traditionally in leadership spaces within Spokane County. Even if percentage wise they might not be the biggest group in our community, they still have their own experiences and challenges which need to be heard.
In all the applications, we’ve seen a lot of folks who represent majorities and minorities in Spokane County. It’s really cool because we’re going to have a space that is representative of all different life experiences, backgrounds and belief systems—and we have all of those people represented in our applicant pool.
This Youth Leadership Council isn’t just about creating solutions. It’s also about thinking critically and interacting with people who have very different experiences than you. This in turn teaches our youth how to advocate for the needs of all people. It’s about knowing who you are and then also learning who others are.
Council members begin their time in January through March engaging in team culture activities and building the skills they’ll need to create a project proposal. Iona’s curriculum includes topics like best practices for research, opening dialogue with members of the community, and tackling systemic problems which defy straightforward solutions.
Once the Council enters March and April, they’ll create proposals using the skills they’ve learned. Students identify a problem and propose a research-based solution to it. They also communicate with someone in the community who already works around said problem or has lived experience with it. This means that part of their proposal may be informed by that person and be all the stronger for it.
With the full proposal written, Council members submit it to all of the Council officers: the Secretary, the Vice Chair, the Chair, and Iona herself. These officers incorporate the proposals into an agenda for the proposal meeting, alongside an executive summary which details the basics of each proposal.
Finally, the big day arrives. Council members present their proposal to the rest of the Council, receiving feedback and insight. Afterwards, they adjust their proposal with this feedback in mind and submit it for a final time.
When it comes time to decide on proposals, each Council member has one vote (except Iona, who has none). Council members decide which projects they would like to fund for the year, with each proposal needing a two-thirds majority to pass. Once a vote has passed, work groups for the proposal are arranged. Council members are assigned to at least one work group, and potentially more if time allows.
What’s special about working with young thinkers like this? What can they bring to the table that maybe someone like you or I could not?
The thing I love about working with young people is that jaded cynicism you get as you age just doesn’t exist yet. Anything is possible. That’s a beautiful thing to center, especially when we’re talking about such big problems.
Reflecting on my own experiences in the last 10 years, the outlook that I had on the world was much more hopeful in the past. I think the more you get generally embedded in systems, (as you get older, in the workforce and all of those things,) it’s hard to hold on to that hope. You see more of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ and you feel the limitations more harshly.
Even if I’m just speaking to my own identity as a woman in business, wanting to go into management, [there’s] sexism. [When I was younger] it was always like, “Oh yes, that is a thing, but we’ll work through that.” Yet actually working in those systems can be very disheartening. That cynicism creeps in.
Our young people mostly have this pure, uncolored belief that change is possible—which even on its own is so powerful. And when you fund that belief, it can do a lot. Sometimes having a little less context means you can move a whole lot further.
Samuel McLaughlin is a Marketing and Communications Program Associate at LaunchNW.