Education

Think Wisdom Comes With Age? These Young Leaders Will Prove You Wrong.


The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” Clearly, he hadn’t met anyone on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List. The 2021 list includes a suite of impressive young entrepreneurs, activists, scientists, and entertainers, and I had the privilege of speaking with four of them: Kehkashan Basu, Andrew Brennen, Merrit Jones, and Joe Nail. In this excerpt of our conversation, the young leaders share their thoughts on what it takes to be a successful leader, their biggest challenges and lessons learned during a trying year, and their words of wisdom for other young people who want to seek solutions to planetary problems.* 

Vicki Phillips (VP):

Young people like you all are leading significant conversations and movements around the world. What qualities do you think make for a strong youth leader?

Kehkashan Basu (KB):

The most important thing is empathy, because it allows you to not just see your own challenges, but to see others’ challenges and think of them as your own. For me, and in my work, and especially in these times, empathy is extremely important.

Andrew Brennen (AB):

It’s also important to believe in yourself. In a lot of the rooms that young people find themselves in, the average age is probably twice theirs, and there are going to be older people that are going to challenge you as a young leader—challenge even your right to have an opinion. It’s important to believe that you should have a seat at the table and that your voice matters—and that it matters because it’s your own experience.

In Baltimore, they have a student member of the school board who has repeatedly been the deciding vote in whether or not Baltimore City Public Schools goes back to [in-person] school. He’s been under a lot of pressure from the community for that vote, but he has stood fast on it and has continued to believe in himself. That’s such an important quality when you’re interacting with older people, especially if you’re a black or brown person.

Merrit Jones (MJ):

The quality that I admire in the young people I’ve worked with, particularly in the last year, is flexibility and adaptability. In this moment when so much of our work requires rapid response to address inequities, young people have a unique ability to communicate rapidly through so many different mediums that I think some adult-led organizations aren’t quite yet as evolved in. That kind of adaptability and flexibility around messaging, around getting work out, around mobilizing for causes is something that young people have as a unique skill set and that is really important in youth leaders.

Joe Nail (JN):

I want to echo two points that others touched on—and to add two more. The first one is putting ambition for community or country ahead of yourself. We’ve seen how ambition can lead people astray in critical positions of public responsibility, and oftentimes our youth are grounding moral forces. The second piece, going hand-in-hand with passion, is being able to mobilize and recruit and identify other people to join you. Also, being locally rooted and having a long-term commitment to the work is important. It’s easy to focus on our national politics, which certainly matters, but if we want to see revival in this country it’s going to require commitment to loving and serving our friends, neighbors, community members, and to doing the best we can in our backyard.

VP:

As youth leaders, you all have done amazing things over the past year—but I imagine that, like everyone, you’ve encountered some challenges as well. I’m curious: What’s been the biggest challenge of the last year for you?

MJ:

There have been so many challenges over the last year, but one for me, as a white woman working to push education equity and justice forward, was reevaluating my role within this context, my background, and the way that youth ecosystems work so that we’re not recreating the systems that have marginalized people for so long. A lot of young people are having that critical conversation that a lot of adult-led organizations aren’t ready to have. That gives me hope for a future where we are creating better power-sharing systems and making sure power is transferred thoughtfully to the people that are most impacted. A key challenge I’ve had is looking within the work I do on student voice to figure out how we make sure we’re not replicating that [old] system and we’re thoughtful about how we move forward.

JN:

For me, the hardest thing has been realizing just how poorly equipped our nation is to do big things together right now—things like dealing with a pandemic or elections, things that going into this year if you had looked at any sort of metric internationally of where the United States ranks, we were supposed to be exemplars for the rest of the world. It’s been really disheartening to realize just how much work we have to do to get back to a place where our institutions function as they should.

AB:

For me, it’s been a challenge to manage my own mental health among everything happening around us. I agree with Kehkashan that empathy is something that’s really important. The flip side of empathy during a pandemic and a racial uprising is that there are a lot of people who are in crisis, and it’s impossible to not internalize that when you’ve been working so closely with the community. The hardest thing for me has been giving myself the permission to take time to step back when I need. For young people who are engaged in this work, I think it’s important that we all give ourselves the permission to take the time we need to manage our own mental health, because it makes us more powerful advocates for our communities if we do.

VP:

That’s a great segue to my final question. What advice or words of wisdom do you have for other young people who want to make positive change in the world?

KB:

Recognizing the interconnections amongst environment, society, the economy, and the Sustainable Development Goals is really crucial. At the same time, localizing the SDGs and localizing your solutions—while it’s important to dream big, it’s how you implement that dream that really counts.

JN:

Rather than offering my own advice, I’m going to go back to the advice that Bryan Stevenson gives in a lot of his talks that I think everyone should hear. He has four steps. Number one is: stay proximate to those you want to serve. Number two: you have to change the narrative. Number three: stay hopeful. And number four: realize that you’re going to have to do uncomfortable things to see or realize the change that you want to have.

MJ:

I’d remind people that being young is a power in and of itself. Your energy and ideas and optimism will be what is useful, not only in the future but absolutely today. Young people are not only experts in their own experience but experts in so many other things.

VP:

Good advice and a really good conversation. I appreciate you taking the time and being so open about both the power of what you’re doing and some of the challenges facing the country and the world. I look forward to continuing our conversation and seeing what you all do in the future.

 

[*] The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.



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