This summer, a couple of our Pioneers (Grades 3 - 5) were walking past a group of our Pathfinders (Grades 1 & 2) engaged in their kite-building workshop. One Pioneer who was new to PEAK exclaimed, “I wanna do that!” Our returning Pioneer shook her head and said, “No, you don’t. That’s for Pathfinders.”

It was music to my ears! It was such a simple interaction and it may not sound like much but what it indicated was that this Pioneer understood that she was on a journey and she had already completed that phase. Our returning Pioneer could not lay out PEAK’s leadership development scope and sequence but she knew in her gut that she had moved on from that work and something more challenging lay ahead for her.

We define leadership as understanding, developing and using your power to positively influence people and/or places. By our definition, leadership is a process, not a destination and certainly not a title. So how do we steward that process so it is effective for a wide variety of kids (we work with over 500 kids per year) AND is doable for a small staff?

The PEAK team has learned much about how to do progression well through trial and error. When I reflect on our continuous improvement journey, there are three goals that I would encourage organizations like ours who are trying to nurture youth leadership to consider:

Build a Culture of Progression

Everything we do is grounded in the belief that everyone leads. Our job is not about making our young people fit into a model of leadership. It is about paying attention to their inclinations and struggles and helping them move into a space where they can positively influence people and places more often and more effectively. It is important that the whole team has buy-in on what it means to allow our participants to fail forward by putting them in positions where they are asked to do things that are a bit beyond what they can do currently and then putting structures in place to support that learning. It also means that we create opportunities that reflect our belief that leadership includes a range of skills, proclivities and talents.

What a Culture of Progression Looks Like At PEAK :

Our Leaders in Training (LT) internship program offerings have evolved over the years to reflect the different types of leadership capacities that we were observing in our young people. For example, this fall, our internship positions include an Operations Intern (learning to create and implement structures that support) Media Intern (learning to capture influential images and stories that influence) and Ambassadors (learning to the tenets of public speaking, outreach and engagement). A Culture of Progression also means that we listen to what our young people are saying about how they would like to contribute and create programming to support that. Speak On It is an internship program that was created in response to our LTs’ desire to create more safe spaces for young people to converse about topics that are important to them. Those interns have partnered with Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention to do conversation circles, they have led workshops at conferences and they have created a podcast, all geared toward creating discussion space.

LT Interns leading a Speak On It podcast episode with their peers. Listen to their podcast here.

Get Clear About Goals

Understanding what you are shooting for allows staff to have way more flexibility in figuring out what’s the best way to get there with their youth in their specific circumstances. Set curriculum is a must AND can sometimes be a barrier to being nimble and responsive if staff don’t have the right context. If I give you a set of instructions without the destination, you have to be very rigid about following those instructions to the letter or else you will be lost. If I give you the destination and a general map, you now have the power to take detours where you see fit. That flexibility is critical for brilliant program staff who want to be responsive and decide what would work best in the moment. PEAK has 8 leadership foci based on our Four Beliefs:

EVERY LIVING BEING HAS INHERENT VALUE

Strengths Focus & Empathy

THE COMMUNITY IS BETTER WHEN EVERYONE CONTRIBUTES

Communication & Collaboration

WE CAN ONLY GROW WHEN WE’RE HONEST ABOUT OUR MISTAKES

Self-Awareness & Resilience

EVERYONE HAS THE POWER TO CHANGE THEIR WORLD

Growth Mindset & Problem Solving

We also have program objectives for every age level and each major program area, These tools, along with the Culture of Progression, allow your program staff to shine and create impactful experiences for your youth.

What Clear Goals Looks Like At PEAK

One of the key experiences that we want our young people to complete by the end of their time with us is serving as a leader for younger participants or peers. Given that goal, staff have been able to create opportunities to prepare for that ultimate goal from first grade onward. From Maggie Kellogg, Program Coordinator extraordinaire, structuring sessions so that Pathfinders (Grades 1 & 2) are taking turns creating check in questions for the group to Lila Weatherall, PEAK’s Director of Teen & Community Programs, creating Learn to Lead program that teaches high school students to create and facilitate high quality workshops based on their own interests, our program staff are able to identify and create right-sized opportunities for our young people to actually do the work and learn from it.

Pathfinder, Perry, leading his group through an activity. At PEAK we believe in “right-sized” leadership at every age.

Offer Authenticity At Every Stage

Simulations are great. Skits are great. Hypotheticals are great. Discussions are great. AND there is nothing that replaces the real deal.

Youth must be given opportunities to explore their innate capacity for leadership at an early age and, at PEAK, we offer an environment that offers leadership opportunities, big and small, formal and informal, for all participants. When youth are given the opportunity to learn in authentic situations, the learning becomes significantly more powerful. Authentic doesn’t mean formal, large or even planned. It just means that they are able to get actual feedback from the environment on how their approach worked.

What This Looks Like At PEAK

For example, in teaching about collaboration and how to handle differing opinions, a common strategy is to discuss different approaches and how participants would handle different situations.

The PEAK approach is to go beyond discussing to doing, then discussing. PEAK’s Leadership Labs are a series of workshops centered around projects that require leadership skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, self-awareness, and empathy. When we are focused on collaboration as a skill in Leadership Labs with our elementary age students, we discuss collaboration and strategies that they believe would work when they have differing opinions.

But we don’t stop there. We then give small groups a task that demands collaboration and will certainly lead to differing opinions, like building a marshmallow tower that will hold a box of tissue. They jump into that project and then they can see what they actually did when there was disagreement. They can see how their strategies worked in reality. When they can test out their strategies in real time and actually have data to reflect on, it is much more likely that the learning is “sticky” and they’ll employ lessons learned in the future. Then, debriefing questions like the following produce a much more robust discussion:

You had a plan. You just tried your strategies. How did they work?
What did you notice?
Did they help you meet your objectives?
What would you tweak and what would you keep?

PEAK participants working collaboratively to create a vision and design for their own Little Library, in collaboration with Rooted MKE.

As youth serving organizations, I think we would all like to get to a place where youth are leaving with a sense of efficacy and a desire to make positive change in their world and it is not simple. Extending the progressive mindset to ourselves as youth workers makes the process more joyful and sustainable.

In your own life, where are places that you’ve progressed and what helped you get there? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments!

Demetria's Desk: How PEAK Creates Progression