What Youth Engagement Taught Me About Power and Trust

Reflections on meaningful youth engagement and why it matters

Is it just me, or is youth engagement everywhere? It's featured in our proposals, in the mission statements on our websites, or as an agenda item in our strategy meetings. Well, that's because many of us truly believe in it and want to create environments where young people feel seen, heard, and valued.

But the hard truth is, despite our best intentions, many youth-serving systems have been slow to fully embrace the fact that young people are not only experts in their own experiences but also creators of solutions that adults have yet to imagine.

Defining Meaningful Youth Engagement:

In my work over the past decade, I’ve noticed we often talk about “youth engagement” as if everyone understands it the same. If you ask ten adults, you'll probably get ten different definitions.

In behavioral health, we often look at engagement through the lens of service delivery: are they attending sessions, are we retaining youth in our programs? While these metrics are vital, they only tell part of the story. 

Meaningful youth engagement is multifaceted and defined in many ways, but the through line should be that it's empowering. It’s the shift from a young person just showing up to a young person having a prepared seat at the table where decisions are made. It’s a partnership built on active collaboration, shared decision-making, and deep alignment, where young people feel committed because the work actually reflects their lives. 

Youth engagement has been the heart of my work for over a decade, and it has become one of my passions. So, I’m not writing to judge or share a magic formula. Instead, I want to share my lessons learned, my aha moments, and the experiences that have helped me rethink what meaningful youth engagement can become when we genuinely try to get it right.

When We Get it Wrong: The Trap of Tokenism

Before moving forward, I want to pause for a moment. When we hear the word tokenism, it can feel uncomfortable, almost like a personal attack. I get that. But what I’m naming here is not a criticism of our intentions. It’s the gap between how much we truly care for young people and how our participation structures are actually designed.  

Where that gap exists is often where tokenism lives. It shows up as challenges that signal the need for better structures, more precise guidance, and strong support systems to engage youth in sustainable ways. Some of my most challenging youth engagement experiences have also been my greatest teachers. Those moments were when my passion for youth engagement turned into advocacy, and when my discomfort pushed me to lean into accountability rather than pull me away. I can confidently say I’m better professionally because of those moments. 

Here’s what I have learned about tokenism and why it tends to happen: 

Lack of budget: 

• Budget constraints have always been and will continue to be one of the biggest hurdles to youth engagement. Countless times, I’ve seen organizations assume that young people want to engage in their programs, initiatives, or organizations strictly out of goodwill or passion. When we fail to budget, youth engagement becomes a luxury only some youth can afford. Financially investing in young people's expertise removes invisible barriers that prevent diverse voices from being invited to the table. You also show young people that their time matters, their voices are respected, and you value their lived expertise as professional work. 

  
  

Lack of staff capacity:

• Meaningful youth engagement requires preparation and real organizational reflection. I’ve managed initiatives as a single staff member and as part of a larger team, and when staff are stretched thin, engagement feels more like a checkbox than an intentional best practice. Before launching your engagement strategy, it’s worth asking: how many hours this will actually require, how many hours we can dedicate, whether there is a dedicated support person to lead this, and whether we have the systems to support them. Youth engagement will inevitably become tokenistic when it lives outside your scope.

Lack of clarity about decision-making power:

• The first time a young person told me, “It’s kind of frustrating doing all this work and not knowing where it’s going,” it made me feel like a failure, and in some ways, I had. We designed a logic model, compensated youth, but weren’t honest about what they could actually change. When young people invest time and share their ideas without knowing whether it leads to real impact, they become disengaged. Clarity builds trust. Identify where young people have decision-making power, constantly reevaluate those boundaries, and communicate early.

When We Get it Right: The Power of Trust

In contrast, the first time I heard a young person say, “It feels good to own something,” I felt inspired to keep going because I understood meaningful engagement is rooted in partnership, sharing power, and involving young people as early as possible. 

If we want youth mental health solutions that truly work, we must go beyond symbolic involvement and cultivate environments where youth voices are not only heard but trusted, respected, and ingrained within organizational structures. 

Here’s what I’ve learned about what happens when we trust the expertise of young people:

We share power from day one:

• Meaningful youth engagement shouldn't start with a finished product. Youth should be invited to participate from the very beginning to help us define the problem, co-design the solution, outline the program’s goals, key activities, and what success should look like. This means ensuring the youth most impacted by mental health challenges, including youth of color, LGBTQ+ youth, foster youth, disabled youth, rural youth, and others whose voices are often marginalized, are front and center to build solutions that actually reach the people who need them the most. 

We lean into being wrong:

• “This sounds great, but none of my friends would use it”. For years leading up to this moment, I had worked alongside young people, helping to build national solutions, consulting with organizations on how to construct youth engagement frameworks, and conducting research to evaluate the best models for incorporating lived expertise. I truly believed I had it all figured out, but young people challenge assumptions we’ve grown comfortable with. Because we weren't afraid to go back to the drawing board, we shifted from launching something for youth to a youth-led model that exceeded our success metrics and became something youth actually adopted in their daily lives.  

We value lived expertise as evidence:

• Young people notice things adults will overlook. They can quickly explain when something feels inaccessible, outdated, or unsafe by pointing out when language isn’t youth-centered or culturally relevant, when it feels too clinical, and when, realistically, we don’t need another app. They recognize nuances around the details like privacy, access, and inclusion that even the most well-researched adults often miss. Most importantly, they remind us that mental health is not just an issue to solve but their everyday experience navigating their school hallways, family dynamics, identities, and digital lives. When we treat this lived expertise with the same weight as clinical research, our systems can finally catch up to the needs of young people. 

  
  

Youth Engagement is Not a Nice-to-Have; it is a Must-Have.

The benefits of youth engagement extend beyond our organizations and systems. The National Academies’ "Promise of Adolescence" emphasizes that opportunities for social and emotional engagement during adolescence serve as protective factors, acting as a buffer against risk and isolation at a time when many mental health conditions first appear. As young people lead, their confidence, sense of purpose, and agency grow. 

I have seen this success through structures such as youth-led research, youth participatory action research, advisory groups, youth-led governance boards, and youth-designed services, which are effective because they do more than include youth; they position them as collaborators and co-creators.

Moving Forward Together

Including youth is not easy, but it is worth it. Adultism exists in all of us. Sharing power with young people can feel uncomfortable, and time and resources are limited. I know how hard it is to walk the talk, but struggling in this work doesn’t mean you don’t care, nor is it an excuse to stop.

At BHT Impact, we are committed to helping bridge this gap. This is the first in a series of conversations exploring meaningful youth engagement in youth behavioral health. To support you, we are developing a suite of resources, including:

• Toolkits and frameworks on how to design youth engagement programs, including questions and considerations to ask yourself

• Reflections on what’s working, what’s hard, and what’s next in youth engagement

• Case studies and highlights from the field of engagement approaches and models.

• Interview series with youth and youth-serving organizations focused on learning, shared insight, and feedback. 

• Our public database of companies will also highlight organizations that partner to increase access to youth voices in designing and developing solutions

I want to hear from you!

Share your youth engagement experiences with us. Your honesty will help shape these resources to be as helpful as possible.

Share Here

Remember, youth engagement starts with a decision, and does not need to be perfect to be meaningful. 

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This post was prepared for BHT Impact by Dominique Freeman. BHT Impact is a fiscally sponsored project of Moore Impact, a 501(c)3 public charity.