Volunteering can be an excellent opportunity to practice leadership skills, whether this is taking on a role within your organisation, or externally. However, young women in your context may not easily make the connection between service to others and leadership, and you may need to guide them in understanding this. Use examples to help them to see that there are many different forms of leadership and how this relates to the experience they could have as a volunteer.
We found that many things helped us to create a dynamic atmosphere to foster youth leadership:
- Get young women involved in every aspect of the project, from development to
- delivery and evaluation. Make sure they have the support they need to do this.
- Make sure the activities are tailor-made and interactive – not formal or school-like.
- Involve women of different ages with different leadership experiences so that the young women can ask them questions.
- Make sure young people can give feedback. This allows them to practise constructively voicing their thoughts as well as building their confidence.
Reflection Questions
- To what extent do you give young women the chance to lead in your organisation?
- If you have done it, what went well? How could you improve it?
- If you haven’t, can you think of how you could start to do this?
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