It is International Youth Day, and this year’s theme is Different Contexts, Common Aspirations. Our Youth Council spent the summer showing what real youth leadership looks like.
The girls who come through our doors arrive from very different places. Some are newly arrived in the UK. Some were born and raised in Brixton. Some are navigating things no young person should have to. What they want is remarkably similar: to be heard, to have opportunities, and to have some say in their own futures.
What youth leadership actually means
Young people are often invited to participate. They are far less often given power.
That distinction matters. At Baytree we work to close that gap, because we believe every young woman has leadership potential, even when structural barriers and social pressure have taught her otherwise.
Through tailored workshops, academic support and one to one mentoring, girls build the skills leadership actually requires. Public speaking. Managing a project. Working out what to do when there is no obvious answer. These are not abstract exercises. They are what lets a girl discover what her voice sounds like and what it can do.
Turning up to a session is participation. Deciding what the session should be is leadership.
Our Youth Council
The clearest expression of this is our Youth Council.
The Council gives girls a genuine say in shaping our programmes, our activities and where Baytree goes next. It is not a suggestion box. It reflects our commitment to co-production, the principle that services work better when the people using them help design them.
This summer, the Council designed our three week EmpowerHER Summer Programme. Not contributed to it, designed it. They went round the youth service asking every girl what she wanted from the programme, brought all the answers back together, and worked through them to decide what should run and where they would go. Every activity and every trip was their call.
The result was a summer built by the girls attending it, shaped by what the whole youth service actually asked for rather than what we assumed they wanted.
That matters for two reasons. It is the only leadership training that is not a simulation, because the decisions are real and the girls are accountable to their peers for them. And it makes Baytree better, because young people notice things adults do not.
Different contexts, common aspirations
Youth voice only means something when it changes what happens next. At Baytree we would rather hand girls something real and let them run it than ask their opinion and carry on as we were.
That is what we will keep doing, because the girls here are not the leaders of tomorrow. They are already leading.
Find out more about the girls behind our Youth Council, and how you can back their work.
