Giving Compass' Take:

• The Open Society Youth Exchange team explains how to facilitate youth participation within the donor space to inform funders on crucial issues. 

• As an individual donor, how do you include young people into your charitable giving strategy? 

• Learn about the importance of funding youth civic participation. 

Involving children and young people in our work — as grantees, consultants, researchers, and/or key informants — helps support their right to shape how the issues that affect their lives are addressed and makes our work as funders more impactful. Philanthropies should consider the right to participation — a key right in democracies — an important aspect of their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.

If, as funders, we are committed to supporting young climate activists at the local, national, and international levels, we also need to create spaces within our organizations for them to influence our thinking and ways of working. At the Open Society Foundations, the Youth Exchange team strategy refers to this as "modeling behavior," a form of "prefigurative politics": creating, here and now, in our organizational practices, the change we want to see more generally in society. While many in the philanthropic space already support young activists and guidelines already exist as to how to provide financial and non-financial support to child and youth organizers and child- and youth-led organizations, there are many others who wonder how they can do that.

Nine Basic Requirements for Child and Youth Participation

  1. Participation must be transparent, informative, and relevant.
  2. Participation must be inclusive.
  3. Participation should be respectful, relevant, and take into consideration children's and young people's own priorities and interests as well as their existing commitments to study, work, and free time.
  4. participation always needs to be voluntary.
  5. Participation should be youth- and child-friendly and respectful of the skills, experiences, and competencies of young people.
  6. Participation should be supported by training in facilitation, effective communication, and children's rights for both adults and young people.
  7. Participation always needs to be safe and sensitive to risk for participants.
  8. Lastly, funders and conveners should be accountable to participants, which means children and young people should be given feedback about the degree to which their views were taken into account and have the opportunity to share feedback about their experience.

Read the full article about how foundations can support children by Rachele Tardi and Zachary Turk at PhilanTopic.