When Young People Lead: What Youth Power Actually Looks Like Inside Ubuntu Village Programs

There is a phrase that circulates in nonprofit and development spaces like a kind of good faith signal: youth-led. Organizations use it in grant applications. Funders ask for it in proposals. It appears in theory of change documents, strategic plans, and impact reports. But the phrase rarely survives contact with actual program architecture. When you look closely at what “youth-led” means in practice at most organizations, what you find is youth-consulted, youth-photographed, or youth-thanked — but not youth-designing, youth-deciding, or youth-holding-the-budget.

Ubuntu philosophy holds that no one becomes fully human in isolation. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — I am because we are. That principle does not have an age limit. A community that excludes its young people from substantive decision-making is not applying Ubuntu. It is applying something older and more familiar: the belief that power flows in one direction and that wisdom only accumulates with time. Ubuntu Village has had to unlearn that assumption deliberately, and the unlearning has made better programs.

The Difference Between Participating and Leading

Participation means you are present. Leadership means you have a substantive role in shaping what happens, what gets measured, and what gets changed. These are not points on a spectrum — they require different program architectures. A participation model asks young people to show up to something already designed. A leadership model asks young people to be part of the designing — including the uncomfortable questions about what is not working, what should be dropped, and what the organization is getting wrong.

Ubuntu Village has learned to ask a specific question at the program design stage: who is missing from this room who actually knows the conditions this program is trying to address? The answer is almost always young people. Not because young people hold all the answers — intergenerational knowledge is irreplaceable and intentionally built into how Ubuntu Village operates — but because the lived intelligence of those closest to the ground is the kind that organizations consistently undervalue and consistently need.

The shift from participation to leadership is not a change in attitude. It is a change in who has authority to name the problem, design the response, and evaluate whether it worked. What gets counted depends on who is doing the counting. When young people help define the metrics, what gets measured changes. And when what gets measured changes, what programs do changes with it.

East Harlem: When Young People Changed What the Program Was

East Harlem is not a community in need of outside expertise about its conditions. It is a community with four-hundred-year-old roots in what colonization, displacement, and redlining made of a neighborhood that was already thriving before those forces arrived. Young people growing up in East Harlem carry that history in their bodies and in their families — the displacement pressure, the school-to-prison pipeline, the health consequences of environmental racism, and also the mutual aid networks, the cultural memory, the resilience infrastructure that did not appear in any needs assessment because no one measuring deficits was looking for assets.

When Ubuntu Village’s East Harlem programs began intentionally building in youth decision-making roles — not advisory roles, not youth council roles where young people make recommendations that adults then evaluate — but actual design authority over how programs ran, the programs changed. Young people identified gaps in what was being offered that adult program staff had not seen. They named what made certain programming feel patronizing. They pointed to what the neighborhood already had that the program was duplicating unnecessarily — and what was genuinely missing that no one had thought to build.

This is not a story about young people being given a chance. It is a story about an organization recognizing that it was making worse programs by designing without the people whose lives the programs were supposed to serve. That is a structural correction, not a charitable gesture. Sustainable community organizing requires honest accounting of who is in the room when decisions get made — and honest reckoning when the answer is wrong.

Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria: Youth as Knowledge Holders, Not Beneficiaries

In Ubuntu Village’s East African programs, the framing of young people as “beneficiaries” has never been accurate — and the program architecture has had to catch up with that truth. Young people in the communities where Ubuntu Village works in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria are navigating simultaneously the inherited structures of colonial land policy, post-independence governance systems, and the specific economic pressures of late-stage global capitalism bearing down on their families. They are doing this with a sophistication and adaptability that no outside program designer has. They are the experts on their own conditions.

What Ubuntu Village has learned from working alongside youth in these communities is that young people hold a particular kind of knowledge: the knowledge of what is actually changing right now, at the community’s surface, beneath the view of elders who remember how things used to be and international organizations who measure through indicators set in Geneva or New York. Young people see the new routes migration is taking. They know which mobile platforms the community uses and which it has abandoned. They understand which traditional practices are being maintained, adapted, or lost — and have opinions, often strong ones, about what should happen with each.

Ubuntu Village’s community health and food security programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria function best when young community members are not just recipients of program delivery but part of the ongoing conversation about what the program should be doing next. This requires trust — trust that young people’s analysis is accurate, that their critique is worth acting on, and that when a young person says a program isn’t working, that is data, not attitude. African communal economies have always understood that the strength of the whole depends on the contribution of every member — and every member includes those who are young.

What Ubuntu Village Learned Building Youth-Led Community Programs

Ubuntu Village has not always gotten this right, and there is value in saying so plainly. In the early years, “youth engagement” meant what it means at most organizations: inviting young people into spaces designed by adults, for purposes adults had already determined, to accomplish goals adults had already set. Young people were photographed. They were thanked. Their presence was cited as evidence of community buy-in. What they actually thought about the programs — what wasn’t working, what felt disrespectful, what the community needed that the program wasn’t providing — was not systematically sought, because the program wasn’t structured to receive it.

The shift happened when Ubuntu Village began treating youth critique as organizational intelligence rather than as a management problem. When a young person says a program feels like charity, that is a signal about program design. When young people consistently don’t show up to a session, that is data about relevance, not about motivation. When young people propose a different structure and adults reject it without serious engagement, the organization is choosing the comfort of the existing structure over the accuracy of lived feedback. That choice has a cost, and Ubuntu Village has paid it enough times to take the lesson seriously.

Getting it right is not a destination. It is a standing practice that requires ongoing adjustment because communities change, young people age into different roles and out of others, and what serves the community shifts. Ubuntu Village’s commitment is not to have figured it out. It is to keep the feedback loops genuinely open — which means that when young people tell us something isn’t working, the organization has to be structured to actually change.

What Intergenerational Power Actually Requires

Centering youth power does not mean removing elders. Ubuntu philosophy is explicitly intergenerational — it holds that the community’s memory (held by elders) and the community’s present knowledge (held partly by young people) are both necessary and neither is sufficient alone. A program designed only by elders is likely to be deeply wise about the past and less accurate about the current conditions it is trying to address. A program designed only by young people may be precisely calibrated to current conditions and missing the longer arc of what the community has survived and sustained. The goal is not to choose between these. It is to build structures that hold both.

In practice, this means that Ubuntu Village’s programs in East Harlem and across East Africa intentionally create decision-making structures that include both elder advisors and youth members — not in a hierarchy where elders approve what youth propose, but in genuine dialogue where different knowledge is weighted appropriately to the question being answered. Questions about what a community has always done? Elder knowledge leads. Questions about what a community’s young people are actually doing right now? Youth knowledge leads. Questions about what should change? Everyone is in the room, and the decision requires both.

There is no shortcut to this. It requires time, organizational patience, and the willingness to slow down decisions that could be made faster if fewer people were genuinely consulted. Ubuntu Village believes that the programs produced by this slower, more inclusive process are better — more accurate, more trusted, more used, and more sustained over time — than programs produced quickly by small groups of credentialed adults. The community’s most important evaluation of any program is whether people actually use it. Youth-shaped programs pass that test more often. —MM

If there is a young person in your life who is already leading and hasn’t been told — pass this to someone who needs to recognize what they’re seeing.

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References

• Checkoway, Barry, and Lorraine Gutiérrez. “Youth Participation and Community Change.” Journal of Community Practice, 2006.
• Hart, Roger A. Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Citizens in Community Development and Environmental Care. UNICEF / Earthscan, 1997.
• Ginwright, Shawn. Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activists and Teachers Transform Schools. Routledge, 2016.
• Manyara, Geoffrey, and Eleri Jones. “Community-Based Tourism Enterprises Development in Kenya.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2007. (On community-led program design frameworks in East African contexts.)

Related Reading

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• ‣ Building Without Burning Out: Sustainability Practices for Community Organizers
• ‣ What Kenyan Harambee Can Teach American Mutual Aid Movements