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Fresh Tracks Helps Amplify Indigenous Youth Voices
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We know that youth voice is a valuable ingredient in community-based decision making. This is especially true when it comes to addressing issues that affect young people. To solve problems that involve youth, we need to shift away from telling them what to do and towards centering young people as experts who have valuable lived experiences that can inform community-wide action. Their proximity to the challenges and opportunities within their communities allows them to approach problem solving with creativity, clarity, and a deep understanding of what meaningful change can look like.
Youth bring valuable insight rooted in knowledge, culture, and lived experience. With support from trusted adult allies, they can better navigate complex systems and access platforms to share their perspectives. One organization dedicated to filling that adult ally role is the Fresh Tracks program at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. One example of the team at Fresh Tracks serving as adult allies to youth is the recent Youth and Young Adult Wellbeing Project, which is a youth-led participatory action research project. The project supported young people in collecting data about what wellbeing means within their communities. While youth wellbeing is often in the news or included in academic research, it’s less common for young people to have the tools to formalize their own ideas about what wellbeing means in their communities through data collection and analysis. Youth in this project created surveys and resources designed to empower their communities to better understand and support youth wellbeing.
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Fresh Tracks helps youth of all backgrounds access leadership opportunities, build community, and engage in civic action, all while using the outdoors and culture as a tool to promote community wellbeing. Despite this broad reach, one area of particular focus for Fresh Tracks is uplifting and centering the voices of Indigenous youth. Indigenous young people have vital knowledge and insight to share when it comes to critical issues such as climate change, land stewardship, and community wellbeing. Indigenous ways of knowing can help us break out of a siloed approach that might separate issues like the youth mental health crisis from increasing natural disasters and overdevelopment of land. By seeing the problems as intertwined, we are better positioned to generate comprehensive solutions that tackle the root of problems rather than addressing symptoms from the top down. Youth have the most to lose if we don’t take action on climate change, so centering Indigenous youth voices is essential to an effective and just climate movement. It is important to note, however, that this work is an intergenerational effort, not the responsibility of youth alone.
In addition to a less siloed perspective on problems, cultural legacies of storytelling continued by Indigenous youth also can help inform our approach to complex challenges and guide communities towards solutions. Storytelling also can allow for more effective communication about complicated topics. For example, scientific data tracking land use or markers of health can feel confusing and distant to many audiences. Storytelling is a powerful way to express the urgency of an issue and spur people to take action. For Indigenous youth, storytelling is also a way to carry forward cultural knowledge, passing it down through generations and sharing it with broader communities. By combining traditional knowledge, storytelling, and lived experience, Indigenous youth can help reach new audiences and solve problems more collaboratively by opening the door to additional ways of understanding and talking about an issue.
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Uplifting the perspectives of Indigenous youth helps center a more interconnected approach that emphasizes relationships. Adult allyship for youth leaders is a continuation of a long tradition of intergenerational relationships that helps mentor the next generation of engaged community members. NRF is proud to support Fresh Tracks as it amplifies the voices of Indigenous youth, and all youth, from across the country.