Youth Voice in the White House: You Make the Call

I have been working with a number of organizations for years to call for a National Youth Council (as you can see in this video). I believe that having a formal group of young people charged with doing outreach to their peers and building productive working relationships with senior policymakers is an essential complement to episodic events like youth summits and youth roundtables.  

All signs indicate that the administration is listening. Now is the time for advocates to develop a specific proposal on how they think a National Youth Council should work.

Share your advice in the Comment section below.

There are a number of ways a National Youth Council could be structured, each with pros and cons. I’ll lay out the options and turn to you to make the call. Which way would you set it up?

• Create an Official White House Advisory Council. For example, President Clinton issued an executive order establishing a Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. So one option is to pursue a White House Youth Advisory Council to be established by executive order. Sounds great, right? Here’s the rub – the average time it takes to get such an executive order drafted, vetted and signed, develop a selection process for the membership, and then have each member vetted is, drum roll please, two years. So if we started now, odds are a White House Youth Advisory Council wouldn’t be able to have its first meeting until 2013.
  
  
• Create a National Youth Council in a Federal Department, and ask the White House to support it.  Don’t get me wrong, Federal Departments are subjected to an enormous amount of scrutiny as well, but less so than the White House is. Bottom line: chances are a National Youth Council housed in a federal department, say, the Department of Education or the Corporation for Community and National Service, could get off the ground much quicker than one created by a Presidential Executive Order could (the White House could still endorse and support such a council).
  
  
• Create a National Youth Council to Take Action (Instead of to Advice on Policy Decisions). Okay, this is one of those quirks of government that sometimes crop up. It turns out that there is a specific law that carefully regulates any council that is created to advise the federal government. It is called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, whose acronym lends itself to frustrations I may have felt at times when it made it harder to create a Youth Council. That said, the law exists for a good reason – I like the way Wikipedia put it: “an attempt by congress to curtail the rampant ‘locker-room discussion’ that had become prevalent in administrative decisions.” 

Bottom line: if you create a council to do something other than to provide advice on policy decisions, it is quicker and easier to get it off the ground.  For example, a council focused on things like “engaging leaders in the non-profit philanthropic and private sectors to make progress on key national policy goals” and “honoring and highlighting those making a significant impact in their own communities” could be quicker to start than one making policy recommendations.

The Council on Community Solutions is focused on those two things; but since it also is charged with providing strategic input and recommendations to the Federal Gov’t it is not a perfect example of an action-not-policy-advice type of structure – if you know of a better example please let me know!

• Create a National Youth Council Informally.  The President is interested in advancing national conversations about immigration. He could have created an official White House Council on Immigration, but for the reasons discussed above, this could take a long time to get up and running.  So one of the things he did instead was to convene a set of influential stakeholders and ask them to lead a series of conversations about immigration and then come back to share what was learned. The analog in the youth world could be to call together young leaders, ask them to lead conversations with their peers, and come back and share what they learned. This could likely be started quickest of all, but lacks the consistency and visibility of an officially, structured approach.

Enough from me. I’d love to hear from you: which approach(es) should we ask the White House to pursue?

Share your thoughts in the Comment section below or email them to me.

Thaddeus Ferber is Vice President for Policy with the Forum for Youth Investment, and Executive Director of SparkAction.