Youth and Philanthropy: Stop Guessing What Kids Want

There is a very sophisticated way to figure out what young people want from your organization.

Ask them.

I spent a number of years working in economic development, where one of the recurring questions was always how to get young people more involved. How do we make them care about the community? How do we convince them to stay, come back, volunteer, serve, donate, lead?

We hung out in board rooms and kept asking “Why aren’t kids more engaged?”  Instead, we should have asked “what are WE actually doing to engage the kids?”

The answer, at least in my experience, was usually not another youth program designed entirely by adults.

It was giving them something real to do.

And, also — as Executive Director — I just got tired of hearing the same old solutions from board members who were already fried from serving on 10 different boards in town.

So when I wanted to address the lack of affordable housing with an idea to form a real estate investment cooperative and give the community a stake in cleaning up old dilapidated properties in town, I went to the usual bankers and real estate agents but I also went to the local high school BPA. I didn’t want the “this is how we’ve always done it” solutions, I wanted to know what would excite them about a pretty high-concept project. So I went to their class for an hour, told them my idea and… didn’t just ask for their feedback. I asked them to join my steering committee. They sent two representatives for the class and helped our committee develop by-laws, plans, marketing ideas, and work through the same questions all of the rest of us were working through. Then those two girls turned their experience on the steering committee into a BPA project that took them all the way to Nationals in Washington DC. 

We didn’t ask them to attend a special Youth Engagement Session™. We put two teenagers at the same table with bankers, real-estate folks and economic developers and expected them to contribute.

We invested in them the way we wanted THEM to invest in us and – surprise surprise – it turns out that when every idea coming out of your “youth engagement” process sounds exactly like the ideas already coming out of your board meetings anyway, you might not actually be engaging the youth at all!

We tried the same idea in other ways.

A high school teacher wanted her composition class to know that good writing could lead to other careers besides just being an author. I suggested talking to them about grant writing. But instead of showing up with a Powerpoint, I asked them for fun ideas that would make the school better. Not the educational stuff, but the day-to-day life for students. Then I told them my organization would give $500 to whatever project they decided on and had them write a very simple grant. Now the school has flower beds outside as kids walk up.

The next year I went back and made it more of a competition.  What clubs or groups are you in, and what kind of project would help them? Each student wrote their own grant, got letters of support, and we put together a selection committee. That helped lead to the Baker High School eSports Team that’s now won back-to-back State Championships.

The next year, same class, different students, and I broadened it to “what’s one thing that  would make this community better for people your age?” and I handed them a real-life grant application. They did the research and legwork, filled it out, and got awarded a $29,000 grant for a preliminary architectural report exploring the potential for a movie theater in Baker.

We went to the students, asked them what they wanted to see happen, and then actually showed them results. Not someday-philanthropy. Not “learning skills they might use as adults.”  And certainly not “thank you, we’ll take that under consideration.” They looked at their community, identified something they thought would make it better, and helped find resources to make it happen.

Engaged youth.

One of my favorites comes from a high school job fair. I was doing the same thing, asking each student who came to our table “if there was one thing you could do to make Baker better, what would it be?”  We heard the usual answers about adding a McDonalds or a series of zip lines all over town to get you where you needed to go, but one girl and her friend said they wished there were more live theater opportunities for kids after they were too old for Missoula Children’s Theater. Our speech and drama teacher had retired and wasn’t replaced, so there were no high school plays anymore.

So, we launched a Community Theater. Would that be in an Economic Developers text book? Probably not. Did it fit with our mission statement? I’m pretty good at fuzzy logic, so, technically yes!  Would it even work?  Well, I knew I had at least two high school girls and their friends who wanted to help find out.

Counting attendance, concessions, donations and sponsorships, our first production made $23,000.
My board gave me an $850 budget to start it.

One kid, one offhand idea at a job fair, one “wait, maybe we should rethink and expand on what our mission statement actually says”… and this year we just did our seventh production with a group of over 30 volunteers from age 5 up to 79.

And sometimes what young people tell you is much bigger than the thing you expected to hear.

We started a youth advisory group to present ideas to our board about things that really mattered to them. The first thing they did was raise concerns about mental health. Instead of thanking them for their input and filing the meeting notes somewhere, adults followed through. Working with Public Health, the community ultimately added a high-school counselor, a paid full-time community health worker, and access to 24-hour telehealth services.

Again, as an economic development group, was mental health on our radar?  Not even a little. But we learned that it should have been, and it took a bunch of 15 and 16-year-olds to explain that to us grown-ups.

Those are not pretend outcomes.

They happened because somebody asked young people what they wanted—and then treated the answer as information worth acting on.

I know not everybody’s organization can contort itself into justifying that a Community Theater or an eSports team or a flower bed can help advance the mission. But, did you know that most schools already have work-study programs? And can you think of anything on your plate right now where, “boy, it’d sure be nice if there was someone to handle that for me?” And what if it’s stuff that kids might kind of already enjoy:  Social media, flyers, graphic design, photography, research, building theater sets, writing thank-you cards, talking to people, working behind-the-scenes at events… coming up with Tik Tok dances? Things nonprofits actually need done, and also learning that “community service” can mean a lot more than folding chairs or cleaning up garbage after a fundraiser? And they get an hour off of school to do it! 

I work in a museum now, and I keep finding the same thing is true in a completely different corner of the nonprofit world. Give students a real project, real ownership, and permission to change the plan, and they show up. Our recent project with local sixth graders teaming up with high school seniors that gained the support of the Smithsonian is just the latest example.

And yes, sometimes their ideas are things adults would never have come up with: a pocket park, a movie night, a hot tub at the school, a video game tournament, a music festival, a virtual-reality dinosaur exhibit.

That’s kind of the point.

We all talk a lot about cultivating the next generation of donors, volunteers, board members, and community leaders.

I think we sometimes skip a step.

Before asking young people to care about our organizations, we need to care about what they’re telling us.

Don’t just ask them what they want — Give them something real to do. Use their ideas when you can. Explain it when you can’t. And when something works, make sure they get to see the result.

I know that’s a lot.  If you want three easy steps, try this:
Ask them something that actually matters.
Give them real authority/work/resources.
Then do something with the answer.

That’s the distinction between youth input and youth engagement.

Kids these days aren’t difficult to engage.

But they are very good at recognizing when we never intended to listen in the first place.