Why are we still scared of giving young people power?
My first thought is because everything might get too good.
Young people are advocating for more rest, 4 day weeks, more robust policies, access needs and even saying things out loud like ‘I don’t enjoy work’. Young people aren’t just naming the elephant in the room, they’re demanding he’s set free into the wilderness.
If your governance depends on the elephant (to be clear, the elephant is unsustainable, white supremacist, capitalist, colonial, ways of working) then you might become the person who says things like, young people are so angry these days, they don’t have the patience for governance. Too much screen time, no attention span, ha ha. I’m being facetious here but these are all things I genuinely hear on a regular basis.
I was invited to speak at an event hosted by Clore Leadership a few weeks ago called: Diversifying Governance. The event was timely because last month the Charity Commission for England and Wales and ProBono Economics released a report for the first time since 2017 detailing the demographics of Trusteeships in the last 8 years. Young people, in this case under 30, still make up less than 1% of Trustee roles in England and Wales.
Other headlines include that the average age of a trustee has actually gone up from 60-62, to 65- 69 and over half (54%) of all trustees are retired. I’m grateful to Clore for resourcing a space where we could challenge traditional governance and build momentum for change. That day I was there to particularly focus on young people in governance, how to recruit them, how to empower them, how to retain them and how to genuinely share power with them. What I didn’t expect was having to advocate for young people to be on boards at all.
Photographer Eric Aydin-Barberini - 2025
I often support institutions to think about empowering margalised people in strategic decision making roles and on the whole, teams ask caring things like how can we ensure this person doesn’t feel the burden of representing all people of colour, or what does tangible inclusion look like for disabled people in policy? But when it came to young people specifically, as opposed to other underrepresented identities, people felt their boards weren’t ready, that if recruited their other board members might leave, that young people won’t understand what’s going on and that they’d cause a ruckus.
I could feel that people were nervous about the conflict that might arise if they appointed young people, but if your board is only there to entertain the status quo and won’t make space for challenge, why have one at all? There were a few attendees that I felt were genuinely curious and excited about meaningful power sharing with young people but I left the day with the overwhelming sense that mainly people were fearful. Fearful of upsetting young people, fearful of coddling them, fearful of feeling out of touch.
Aptitude for risk is especially low right now, no funding, every crisis imaginable, world burning, very tired, etc. It’s no surprise then that 1 in 17 trustees in today’s report was appointed through an open access advert, the rest were colleagues and friends that were approached. I can understand how you might want to turn to an ally or friend in rough times to join your board rather than create yet another space for challenge and conflict.
But governance is the essential space for challenge to happen so that all the other spaces can thrive. Right now, boards aren’t built for disruption, the sessions are about 2 hours long, you have policies to review, accounts to sign off and not a whole lot of time to add ‘hang on a minute the whole thing is gonna crumble unless we address overwhelming systemic injustice’ on to the AOB.
Photographer Eric Aydin-Barberini - 2025
Gen Z were at school during BLM, the pandemic and about 10 Prime Ministers. They’ve literally grown up with the language and tools to address inequality, protest, accountability and justice. Aren’t we lucky to have a generation that gets it? Don’t boards require critical thinking? In one of my sessions someone asked me ‘What sort of marketing materials should I use to reach young people’ and another attendee interrupted my answer to say ‘Just definitely don’t use the word governance, they don’t understand it and they won’t get it’.
Truthfully a lot of the language in governance is exclusionary and inaccessible but to so confidently declare that all young people won’t know what governance is at a session led by a young person in governance, well, it made me sad. To also speak over the only young person in the room at a session dedicated to empowering youth voice wasn’t lost on me either. The young people I’ve supported into board roles are compassionate, energised, empathetic, fierce, skilled, engaged and insatiably creative.
You cannot teach the lived experience of young people in the UK but you can absolutely teach them how to use a risk register in 20 minutes, and all the jargon that goes with it.
Another person that day made a joke about how if you were in a junior position you couldn’t just ask your manager to leave and pop off to a board meeting. Everyone laughed because imagine a young person in an entry level role being respected enough to have time out their day to impact change at an organisational level. The joke itself was to exemplify how inaccessible board roles are for young people because they wouldn’t be allowed the time off work. But ignoring the fact that people in less senior roles have less agency over their calendars (and that is a genuine barrier) it brought up something for me about how surprising and laughable it would be for a young person to need to leave work to go to a board meeting.
When you work somewhere like Rising Arts Agency, surrounded by radical dreaming, policies that make sense and real human leaders that listen to you and say honest things like ‘I’m actually having an off day’ it’s easy to forget that elsewhere in the sector the bar is in hell. We call it the Rising effect. Our programme OnBoard, which has recruited 43 young people onto boards in the last 7 years has had the Rising effect on me. I had grown so blissfully accustomed to young people in governance that I forgot for a moment that we had such a painfully long way to go.
When I started at Rising I was 24, I had never considered joining a board or even a leadership role. Now I’m waking up thinking about what I want to say in a blog about governance. In January I became a trustee for Deptford X (wooo, baby’s first board ✨) an organisation that I’m excited to say is thinking about governance differently, somewhere I feel heard and somewhere that’s ready to talk about the elephant. The radical thing that Rising did to prepare me for this was tell me that I could do it.
If you’re feeling energised by the idea of young people making real decisions, get in touch
Love,
Sid Boyer (they/them) Agency Producer, Rising Arts Agency
*This blog was first published by ArtsProfessional 💖
