This International Youth Day, the UN’s theme is “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations”. A reminder that young people in the climate movement may be shaped by very different realities, but share the same ask: to have active roles in building a more sustainable future.
Too often, organisations treat youth input as a box-ticking-exercise and rarely follow through on their input. At The Resilience Project, we’re working hard to ensure we stay true to what it means to be ‘youth-led’.
We’re committed to ensuring authentic leadership by young people in the climate movement. While this started as a Board of Youth, we’re now taking it one step further by replacing our Board of Youth structure with a new Board of Youth Stewards. More than just an advisory board, our Stewards hold real decision-making power and will eventually become the legal owners of our organisation.
So as we transition into this new phase of youth governance, we wanted to celebrate what our Board of Youth achieved, what we learned along the way and how it’s shaped what we’re doing next.
Why we built a Board of Youth
The Resilience Project started as a youth-led organisation from day on. Founded by Katie Hodgetts aged 24, Katie set out on a mission to champion mental health in the climate movement after suffering from burnout while trying to balance the pressures of everyday life with the urgency of being a climate activist. Katie soon realised that her own lived experience was only one version of what youth climate activism looks like, and so she looked to bring in more perspectives: different identities, different regions, different kinds of expertise.
That’s where our Board of Youth came in.
What they did
Over the years, our Board of Youth hasn’t just advised us, they’ve built us. Highlights include:
- Co-designing research with Stanford University and Imperial College London into the effectiveness of our Resilience Fellowship. When the paper is published later this year, several of our Board members will be named co-authors on the published paper.
- From book clubs and yoga groups to decompression spaces at NYC Climate Week, over the years our Board of Youth have helped shape our programmes to ensure they meet the needs of other young changemakers.
- Our members have helped us tell stories and create resources exploring climate emotions through international lenses; writing, speaking and creating content for our social channels.
- They also pushed one of our biggest moves yet: expanding our community in East Africa. It was a Kenyan conservationist on the Board who gave us the confidence to do it right, when so many Global North organisations get this move badly wrong.
Between Board meetings, they facilitated our workshops, introduced us to valuable new connections, advocated for us on global stages, and offered personal support to each other — often while juggling jobs, studies, and seats on two or three other youth boards.
That’s part of what made this Board different from a typical advisory board. There’s a stereotype that young people lack experience. In the climate movement, it’s often the opposite, with some of our members leading organisations for a decade before turning 25. Our job as conveners wasn’t to manage a lack of experience. It was to make sure a space built around service didn’t become just another obligation; to protect room for rest, and for the people on it to occasionally just be young.
What we learned
Three years in, the Board of Youth had strongly shaped almost every part of this organisation. But on paper, their power was limited. They could advise. They couldn’t decide.
We kept coming back to the same question: what does it actually look like to be youth-led, not just youth-advised? So we set out to build something new that gave more power to the young people we exist to serve.
What we’re doing now
Although our Board of Youth is being phased out as an advisory body, this isn’t us stepping back from being a youth-led organisation… It’s us going even further.
We’re transferring legal ownership of The Resilience Project to a group of eight young people we’ve met through our own programmes: our new Board of Stewards.
Our Stewards hold more than just advisory roles. We will report to them, and be held accountable by them – the first governance model of its kind, to our knowledge, anywhere.
Many of our Board of Youth alumni (including Tori Tsui, Dorcas Wago, and Elijah McKenzie-Jackson, among others who shaped this organisation) remain part of our story as facilitators, advisors and community members.
Different contexts. Common aspirations. And, finally, a governance model built to match them.
