Youth-serving organizations almost always emphasize cultivating leadership skills, but how often are those youth empowered to be the architects of their own vision when putting those skills into practice? How often are youth set to work executing a vision that adults have already created, on their behalf?

There is a balance to be struck, of course; research consistently shows the effectiveness of centering participants in program design, and all of our work at She’s the First centers girls, in the sense that programs are developed by listening to, designing with, and implementing with the people for whom the programs are intended. However girl-led programming takes this a step beyond girl-centered programming: relinquishing actual leadership power and putting it in the hands of girls, allowing the work to be defined by and led by girls, not program staff.

It can, of course, be uncomfortable for staff to take a back seat and follow the vision of the youth they work with, providing mentorship and administrative support as needed. But as activism researcher Lyn Mikel Brown wrote in Powered by Girl: A Field Guide to Supporting Youth Activists this is exactly why should be doing it. Everyone loves to embrace “girl power,” only to recoil when girls push back against the status quo. This knee-jerk reaction can be a sign that well-meaning organizations are subconsciously treating the girls in their program as products or case studies, rather than whole, complicated people. And when girl activists are seen as a product in a program’s system, Brown found in her research, they “are lifted out of the relationships, support systems, and communities that enabled their remarkable work,” seen as exceptional, such that the advocacy programs built to support them lean towards self-improvement and less toward disrupting social systems. By contrast, intergenerational activist work with supports systems—“where girls have control over the way things go”—has proven the most effective means of resistance to structural and systemic oppressions.

Creating an environment for projects to be truly youth-led can be challenging—it requires commitment and flexibility from your entire team. But at She’s the First, we’ve already seen remarkable results as we’ve transitioned from girl-centered activism campaigns to girl-led campaigns. We’re seeing this kind of shift towards a girl-led advocacy approach in localized programs across the sector, in organizations like EMpower, CARE, and Save the Children. It demonstrates to youth—who highly value transparency and authenticity—that we mean it when we tell them they are capable of leading. This transition hasn’t been and won’t always be easy; there have been pitfalls, adaptations, and plenty of going back to the drawing board as we’ve learned and continued forward.

Read the full article about youth-led advocacy by Kate Lord and Janae Phillips at Stanford Social Innovation Review.