Programs are more effective when young people help shape them continuously. That means starting from needs they have named themselves and giving them real influence over how programs are designed, adapted, and carried forward over time.

Across the Co-Lab, organizations are finding that youth participation is not a one-time design step but an ongoing practice that leads to better outcomes. When young people have genuine power to influence what gets built, how it evolves, and when it changes course, the work improves significantly.

As one young participant in #HalfTheStory's programs put it:

Start from what young people actually need.

A young person involved with EMpower describes what draws youth to participate in programs in the first place:

Several Co-Lab organizations have built their programs around this idea. Maddison O’Gradey-Lee, co-founder of the Orygen Global Youth Mental Heath Fellowship, describes consultations with young people across the globe surfaced the same narrative: "Youth advocates wanted training and support in their work and needed to be connected to other youth mental health advocates." The fellowship's structure — flexible, community-centered, and led by young people with lived experience — emerged directly from those conversations. Critically, fellows are not expected to produce a fixed output during the program.

Kat Hamilton of Force of Nature describes their philosophy: "We don't design something to help them; we see a need and want them to tell us how to meet that." When Force of Nature's recruitment strategy stalled before a major program launch, the team pivoted to asking community members who had already been through the program to share why they joined and what changed for them. "It shifted to a storytelling approach," Hamilton says. The organization ended up surpassing its recruitment target.

Hannah Hooper, Force of Nature's head of programs, noted the power of this approach:

Force of Nature's climate café initiative reflects this principle in practice. The organization created an open-source guide for hosting community conversations about climate emotions, then let young people run with it. Hosts sign up, receive micro-grants to cover logistics, and adapt the format to their local context. The result: young people have run climate cafés in over 50 countries. As Kat Hamilton describes it, "It's putting power back in the hands of young people and letting them know they matter."

Co-design changes what gets made.

At Hopelab, co-design with young people is “the baseline,” program lead Josh Lavra says. When the organization tried to adapt an existing chatbot for queer and trans youth, they brought the prototype to young people first. "Across the board, they hated it," Lavra said. The tool's positive psychology techniques didn't fit the stressors these young people faced. That feedback led to years of iterative co-design with roughly 600 young people, resulting in a completely different product — imi.guide — that has since been used by over 200,000 young queer and trans people. "We wouldn't have learned that without doing co-design," Lavra reflects.

Daniella Ivanir of #HalfTheStory involves young people at every step, from curriculum development to branding to business decisions. "They are integrated in the creation of programs and curriculum and business ventures," she says. The payoff shows up in details that might otherwise be missed. When a student opened an application for the organization's summer program, their reaction was that "it felt like someone who was Gen Z made it." Ivanir also has teenagers co-lead meetings and sessions, because "it's going to be more powerful for a group of teenagers to be in a meeting that's also led by someone their age range."

Real influence means sharing power.

Several organizations emphasize the gap between genuine power-sharing and surface-level inclusion. O'Gradey-Lee highlights the importance of actively reducing power imbalances: "Dismantling that power imbalance and showing them that we trust them and we see them as equal partners in the work is key." Her organization shifted from one-on-one mentoring to group mentoring after fellows found the individual format uncomfortable — a change that came from listening. She credits Orygen's institutional trust as essential: "They said, 'We're here if you need. We'll support, but do this. Go for it. We believe you.'"

One young advocate at Inseparable describes what meaningful inclusion looks like:

Force of Nature reimburses young people for focus groups and consultations, recognizing that "there's a lot of extraction of young people's time, which doesn't meet with integrity nor values the expertise that young people bring," Hamilton says. Hopelab takes the same position. "We compensate young people in every interaction we have with them, because they're the expert," Lavra says. "It's the same way I would compensate a doctor who came in to talk about medicine."

Tony Weaver, Jr., of Weird Enough offers a different lens on what it means to share power with young people. He is skeptical of advisory boards that function as resume-builders, where it can be "difficult to gauge what's true and what they think will make you happy." Instead, he argues that "the strongest youth voice doesn't come from their mouths; it comes from their behavior." He points to the dominance of middle-grade graphic novels in publishing as evidence. "Middle-grade graphic novels were the highest-grossing vertical in print publishing in 2019,” he noted. “That's youth voice to me." His organization watches what young people actually engage with — buying habits, viewing habits, which characters they choose to cosplay at conventions — and builds from there. For Weaver, taking youth seriously means reading what they do, not just what they say in a structured consultation. That, too, is a form of giving young people influence — by letting their actual choices shape what gets made.

When youth lead, programs keep evolving.

What these organizations share is a willingness to keep listening and to change course when what they hear surprises them. Terminology gets updated when it stops landing. Selection processes get reworked when participants say something isn't clicking. Delivery models shift because a group of fellows or advisors pointed out a better way. None of this happens without some discomfort. It means letting go of ideas you liked, admitting that your instincts were off, and trusting that the young people closest to the work can see things you can't. But the organizations that do this consistently find that their programs stay in tune with what young people actually need rather than drifting toward what was true two or three years ago. That's the deeper payoff of putting young people in the driver's seat.

A young person at Luta pela Paz captures what this commitment ultimately requires:

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