What would a youth-centred recovery look like? Here are three bold ideas

There’s no question about it: economically speaking, young people have borne the brunt of COVID-19.

In Canada, youth are experiencing record high rates of unemployment. They’re overrepresented in the precarious and frontline work that puts them most at risk to both the virus itself and to income insecurity. Students are graduating into the deepest recession the country has seen since the great depression, which will significantly impact their career trajectories and lives for years to come.

As civil society organizations and governments work to not just rebuild communities, but build them back better and stronger, they’ll undoubtedly be looking to bolster and empower young people. To do so effectively, they’ll need to pay close, nuanced attention to the perspectives of youth themselves, say advocates. 

In a Future of Good #BuildBackBetter digital conversation on July 21st, four speakers who work with youth shared their visions for a pandemic recovery that centres young people’s needs and perspectives. Here are three key takeaways for your organization.

Equity and intersectionality are non-negotiable

“Youth are not a monolith,” said Linxi Mytkolli, manager of the national summit and innovation labs at Youthful Cities. “An 18-year-old could just be graduating high school and figuring out what life independently even means. Then you can look at a 30-year-old, who is also technically youth, who has a double duty of care for their parents and their young children. We’re not all the same, and that means that policy and recovery efforts cannot be a one size fits all.”

Rejecting a one-size-fits-all recovery framework for youth also extends to intersectionality — recognizing that youth experiencing systems of oppression beyond those related to their age are feeling the effects of the pandemic differently. Candies Kotchapaw is the founder of Developing Young Leaders of Tomorrow, Today (DYLOTT), an organization that provides mentorship and education to allow for career opportunities for Black youth in the Toronto area. “COVID has ravished racialized communities,” she said, so youth of colour need to be centred in any recovery efforts. 

It’s also important to loosen the definition of youth when organizations and governments are centring them in recovery, said Kotchapaw. “When you’re talking about racialized and marginalized communities, the concept of a categorization of age re-marginalizes communities,” she said. “Especially within Black communities, when you get to age 29 or 30, which is a stereotypical and standard definition of a young person, you age out of support systems institutionally.” The problem with this, she continued, is that Black communities don’t age out of systemic oppression at age 30, and can find themselves still in need of institutional support — because of that very oppression and setbacks they experienced when they were considered youth. 

Nadine Duguay-Lemay, CEO of Dialogue New Brunswick, said the pandemic has revealed other barriers that were largely hidden for many youth, too. “We go online and we have this idea that now everyone has access to so much more stuff,” she said. But there are “those folks who don’t have access to the internet, those folks who don’t have access to a decent laptop, bandwidth and their community is so slow they can’t stream a video. They might not have the most supportive or private environment at home. They’ve got kids and they don’t have childcare anymore. [COVID-19] has further deepened those inequities. So we need to centre in whatever we’re building an understanding of who is furthest left behind and who is the furthest from opportunity.”

And it’s important to capture the insights being unearthed about how each of these communities is navigating the crisis, said Mytkolli. “We’re living in a data graveyard right now in our sector,” she said. “We have so many reports about the implications of all these policy actions and inactions [during the pandemic] that we can’t access, because we don’t even know where they are. They live in pockets of this digital space…  and that has to do with the fact that stakeholders are not as aligned as they need to be when research is funded.” In order to make sure that research makes it into recovery plans, she said, there needs to be coordination between funders, researchers and social impact organizations. 

Youth need better access to decent and meaningful work 

The pandemic has illustrated the crucial role youth play in our communities, through their work in essential, frontline jobs — and that this is meaningful and (should be) decent work, said Mytkolli. “We do social purpose work, where we do meaningful and decent work,” she said, but before the pandemic, “few were as quick to say that about servers, grocery store workers, hospital cleaning staff, et cetera. I personally, as well as Youthful Cities, we take the view that all work is meaningful. All work should be decent work.” She added: “Let’s make sure that the young folks and the other folks who are doing this work are protected with the benefits, the services, the infrastructure that they need to be safe in that work.”

Youth of colour in particular are “funnelled into precarious work,” said Kotcahapaw, like the frontline work Mytkolli pointed to.”We really imagine a future where precarious work doesn’t impact our community and the way that it does now,” she said.

To Justin Wiebe, who works with the Mastercard Foundation, decent work means work where young people can embrace their identities. He told the story of meeting a young Indigenous man living in what is known as the Northwest Territories and working at a mine. “When he was there, he wasn’t allowed to speak his language, even though the vast majority of folks that he worked with were people from his community and many of them spoke their language. They weren’t allowed to eat their traditional foods while they were in camp, all these sorts of things.” The young man left the job and found a new one, where he doesn’t face this kind of oppression. Wiebe said this story illustrates a need to centre young people’s rights to express their identities and cultures in any action on decent work post-pandemic. 

Young people need to be in leadership and decision-making roles on recovery

Not only do youth need better opportunities and standards for decent work, but their voices need to be heard through leadership roles and in decision making processes when it comes to recovery. Duguay-Lemay pointed to municipal youth councils as one arena where youth voices could be more meaningfully heard. “I’m not sure how much weight is given to the voices of young people participating in these committees,” she said. 

Mytkolli agreed, adding that these are often “ceremonial-type commitments: ‘We’ll listen to you and your coucill, but only after we’ve actually met with the actual city council, we’ll meet with you. We won’t put you at the decision making table, but we’ll give you airtime just enough so that it feels like we’re listening to you.’” 

Mytkolli said this happens because in government and in the social impact world, professional experience is often valued over lived experience. “I am a first generation Canadian. I never went to camp because my parents couldn’t afford camp, which means I couldn’t get into really competitive volunteer programs, because I was working two jobs to pay off university tuition. And that meant that I didn’t have the experience to sit at these tables. But what we’re trying to do at Youthful Cities is say, that you work two jobs and managed to go through university, the fact that you chose to not go to university and you took a leadership role in your home, that is experience, and that makes you valid and worthy of having to see a decision making table.” 

Kotchapaw says DYLOTT encourages Black youth to create their own leadership opportunities where they find barriers to entry. “We’re saying to our young people, you have the capacity to lead. You know what you need.. And if those powers that be are not listening to what you need to help you be able to lead, go ahead and lead in your own way, lead in your community, lead in developing programs, lead in making those network connections that are going to force the powers that be to pay attention to what you’re doing.”

Our team is working around the clock to deliver insightful stories, analysis, and commentary on how the social impact world can build back better post COVID-19. If you liked this story, please consider becoming a member. Start a 14-day free trial now.

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error