Young collaborators shape an imagined theater production together. Original editorial painting illustrating youth leadership and accessible participation, not a documented program.
Meaningful participation gives young people decisions they can shape, the support to take part and a clear account of what happens next.
By Arbab Naseebullah Kasi, Chief Executive Officer - CEO, Feel Worldwide Foundation Inc.
Imagine a youth representative opening the papers for a meeting and finding that the decision has already been announced. There is a place reserved for their remarks. There is no remaining opportunity to change the plan.
This is a hypothetical scene, not an account of a named organization. Its usefulness is the question it raises: what, exactly, did the invitation make possible?
Young people can gain confidence, meet useful allies and learn how an institution works through participation. Those benefits matter. But when an organization asks them to help shape a service, policy or community project, it creates another expectation: their contribution should have a credible route into the decision.
That route needs to exist before the invitation goes out. It should remain visible after the meeting ends.
Name the decision before recruiting the participants
UNICEF’s Engaged and Heard guidance treats adolescent participation as work requiring organizational commitment, practical support and evaluation. Its companion tip sheets draw on Laura Lundy’s model: space, voice, audience and influence. An opportunity to express a view needs both someone responsible for hearing it and a serious response to it. UNICEF guidance and participation tip sheets.
For an organization putting that approach into practice, the first task is to describe the actual decision. Choosing the subjects of a youth program is different from commenting on subjects already approved. Helping select a service provider is different from attending its launch. Reviewing a policy before adoption is different from being asked to endorse it afterward.
Write down what young people can decide themselves, what they will decide jointly with adults and where they will advise someone who retains final responsibility. Include any legal, financial or safeguarding constraints. A clearly bounded decision can still be substantial. An expansive promise that disappears at the first disagreement cannot carry much trust.
This article concerns those continuing rights and relationships across organizational decisions. It is not a guide to participatory budgeting. Money makes participation possible, but authority also appears in who sets the questions, changes a service rule, chooses a delivery format or decides whether a proposal is ready.
Give youth leadership room to change the question
A young person should be able to notice that adults are solving the wrong problem. Perhaps a program committee is debating more workshops when participants need the existing sessions moved to a time they can attend. Perhaps a school is designing a new reporting form when students are worried about what happens after they submit it.
Allow participants to put issues on the agenda and request information. Give them enough preparation time to examine options and consult others. For decisions within their remit, establish voting arrangements or another agreed method that makes their influence real. Where an adult must retain a veto, define its grounds and require an explanation when it is used.
A documented example of youth agenda-setting comes from Ireland. A September 2024 account of the Comhairle na nÓg National Executive describes 31 elected young people beginning a two-year term focused on school stress, an issue identified through a wider youth process. Members elected their own chairs and other working roles. This records a youth-led structure and chosen priority; it does not, by itself, establish that the requested national policy changes occurred. Comhairle na nÓg’s account.
That distinction is useful. A youth body can own its agenda while still needing a reliable connection to institutions that control implementation. Its independence should be protected, and the receiving institution’s obligations should be explicit.
Make attendance affordable and participation usable
An open application form does not remove the costs of taking part. Travel, mobile data, missed work and caring responsibilities can determine who accepts an invitation. The timing of reimbursement matters, too. Someone who cannot advance the fare needs a solution before the journey, not an assurance that finance will repay them later.
Plan reasonable payment for substantive contributions and cover necessary expenses. Explain payment arrangements clearly, including any relevant local tax or benefits implications that need checking. Support should enable free participation rather than reward agreement with the organization’s preferred answer.
Ask privately what participants need. Accessible venues, interpretation, captions, readable documents, breaks and an alternative to speaking in a large group should be considered at the planning stage. Offer more than one way to contribute. A thoughtful written comment submitted after reflection can be as valuable as an immediate answer in a meeting.
UNICEF’s Evaluation Office described a practical support measure in its 2024 account of a 12-member Youth Advisory Group: assistance with data and internet access. The group’s stated work included checking evaluation questions and helping share findings. It was an advisory role, not evidence that members controlled the evaluation’s final conclusions. UNICEF’s account of the Youth Advisory Group.
Support adults as well. Staff may need practice explaining technical material without condescension, making disagreement safe and leaving room for a slower decision. Training only the young participants can leave the institution’s own habits untouched.
Invite beyond the people already comfortable in the room
Youth is not a single viewpoint. A confident university student cannot be expected to represent an out-of-school teenager, a young worker with unpredictable hours and a rural participant facing unreliable transport.
Explain how members are selected and whose experiences may be missing. Work through trusted community relationships as well as online publicity. Avoid making polished applications or previous committee experience the price of admission when those skills are not necessary for the role.
Representation also requires a way to stay in contact. Give members safe opportunities to seek views from peers, bring those views into decisions and report back. Do not make one participant disclose personal hardship to establish that a group’s concern is legitimate.
Collect only the demographic information needed to assess access and fairness. Explain its purpose and restrict access. In a small group, an apparently anonymous description can still identify someone. Reporting that a particular combination of age, location and disability is absent or present may expose more than intended.
Rotate opportunities thoughtfully. Experienced participants can mentor new members, but an organization should avoid building a permanent inner circle whose availability is mistaken for universal representation.
Protect choice throughout the process
Participation should be voluntary. Young people need to understand the work, its possible benefits, its demands and its risks in language they can use. They should be able to decline a question, take a break or leave without losing unrelated services or being treated as ungrateful.
For participants under 18, obtain the young person’s informed agreement and any parent or guardian permission required by applicable law and the activity’s safeguarding arrangements. Do not assume that one adult signature replaces the young person’s own choice. Where seeking family permission could create risk, consult qualified safeguarding guidance before proceeding. Age, setting and local requirements matter.
Separate permission to participate from permission to photograph, record, quote or publicly identify someone. Explain the intended audience and channels. A person may be comfortable helping redesign a service while declining to appear in its publicity. Be honest about withdrawal limits: an organization can remove material it controls, but cannot promise to retrieve every copy once something has circulated publicly.
Name a safeguarding contact and provide a confidential way to raise concerns outside the immediate activity team. Explain any limits to confidentiality, including circumstances requiring protective action. Plan safe travel and communication arrangements, moderate online spaces and consider risks such as harassment or retaliation after public advocacy.
No participant should have to retell a distressing experience to earn influence. Offer ways to discuss service problems through anonymized patterns, practical recommendations or another trusted person. The organization remains responsible for protection and appropriate support; youth leadership does not transfer that responsibility to young people.
Read the evidence without making it promise too much
UNICEF Innocenti’s 2024 Voices for Impact report interviewed 80 former participants in international forums held between 2017 and 2023. They had been aged 15 to 28 when participating. Within that selected group, the report found that 94 percent described insufficient support and 81 percent saw participation as tokenistic with limited influence on policy and decisions. These are interview-based findings about particular multilateral experiences, not population estimates for all young people or every participation program. Voices for Impact, research methods and key findings.
Those findings support asking harder questions about the process. They do not tell a local organization what percentage improvement a new youth council will deliver.
A separate, February 2026 evaluation of the UNICEF and IOM YESS project in Kosovo offers a useful distinction between learning and institutional influence. It reports an average eight-percentage-point gain in knowledge concerning peacebuilding, tolerance and gender equality in pre- and post-activity data from participants across seven Albanian-majority municipalities. The surrounding activity group comprised students aged 15 to 18. The report also describes youth-led grant projects addressing inclusion and dialogue. YESS final evaluation, pages 36 and 40.
Those learning scores are not an eight-percent increase in decision-making power, nor proof that the project alone caused broader social change. The evaluation notes limitations in establishing early impact across municipalities. It also found that much student council activity responded to school requests or logistical needs, limiting its contribution to youth-led change. Read the promising findings alongside those limits. The practical lesson is to measure what people learn and what institutions actually change as separate questions.
Follow one decision all the way through
Consider a hypothetical community learning center redesigning its youth sessions. None of the details that follow describes a Feel Worldwide Foundation program or a measured result.
The center establishes a youth group with authority to choose session themes and the preferred timetable within agreed staffing and building-access limits. Adults retain responsibility for safeguarding, contracts and employment matters. The group can also propose changes beyond its authority, with a named manager responsible for replying.
Members receive accessible options papers and can gather feedback through short conversations or private written responses. Travel and communication costs are covered in advance where needed. The group discovers that the proposed evening timetable clashes with the last affordable bus home.
It chooses an earlier start and a different mix of sessions. Staff explain which rooms and facilitators are available. Together they resolve the practical conflict before confirming the timetable. The published decision records the change and the youth group’s role, without naming individual participants unless they have separately agreed.
A month into delivery, members review attendance patterns and ask people who stopped coming what made participation difficult, using voluntary, proportionate questions. They can revise the timetable within their agreed authority. If their preferred change is refused on safety grounds, the manager explains the reason and helps explore a workable alternative.
The important feature is continuity. Young people help define the problem, make a decision, see it implemented and revisit it. Their contribution survives the original meeting.
Make feedback part of the obligation
Every recommendation needs a visible destination. Record what was proposed, who must respond, the response date and the eventual decision. Explain whether a proposal was adopted, adapted, deferred or declined, and why. Share that account in a format participants can access, with sensitive information removed.
A response should leave room for challenge. Participants may identify a factual error or propose a less costly version. If a decision is deferred indefinitely, the record should not quietly label it a success.
Evaluate the experience with young people, including those who leave. Ask whether they understood their authority, received needed support, could disagree safely and saw their contributions considered. Alongside those answers, inspect concrete changes to policies, service arrangements or organizational practice. Attendance counts and photographs cannot answer those questions.
Keep measurement proportionate. Publish an honest account of who was involved and the limits of representation, while protecting identities. Agree when the arrangement will be reviewed and what happens when a member’s term ends. Without a handover, the next group may spend its first months reopening questions the previous group already answered.
Leave young people with authority they can use
A useful test for any participation initiative is simple: can a participant name a decision they can shape, the person accountable for responding and the support available if something goes wrong?
If those answers are vague, improve the arrangement before asking for more young people’s time. A smaller commitment with real authority and reliable follow-through can offer more than an elaborate event whose conclusions have nowhere to go.
Organizations interested in exploring a focused collaboration on accessible youth participation, decision rights or accountable feedback can describe their intended contribution and scope through Feel Worldwide Foundation’s partnership inquiry. An inquiry begins a discussion and does not confirm a funded program or service. You can also support Feel Worldwide Foundation’s mission with a donation.
