As Living Proof Advocacy’s 2025 Storytelling for Advocacy Intern, Annie Beth Clark focused on learning more about young advocates and how we, as an organization, can best support their success. Here, she summarizes the learnings from her research project.—T. Cage and J. Capecci, LPA cofounders
With the wonderful support of LPA and its partners, I came into this internship asking three main questions:
What are the unique strengths of youth advocacy storytelling?
Are there challenges to youth advocacy storytelling not seen through traditional adult pathways?
What are the specific needs of teen advocates from adult mentors and advocacy organizations?
I decided to dig into these questions through an empirical qualitative research study, investigating these unique aspects of teen storytelling advocacy from the direct insight of teens themselves. Over the past few months, I’ve had the incredible privilege to speak to young advocates and a few adult youth advocacy experts across the country about youth advocacy strengths, challenges, and needs.
The young advocates I spoke to ranged from ages 17 to 20 and worked in diverse areas of advocacy, such as rare disease, mental health, and youth participatory democracy. Most of them started advocating around 14 or 15 years old. The adults I spoke to worked in broad sweeping advocacy spaces and the foster care system, including LPA’s founders, John and Tim.
Before the interviews, I learned that many of the insights we have about youth advocacy to date come from adult perspectives. From these perspectives, we know that youth advocacy storytelling is incredibly compelling, emotionally attuned, and struggles primarily to cut through the noise of adult-centered politics. I knew going into this study that one of the biggest barriers to teen advocacy would be age prejudice. I did not know, however, that this age prejudice would negatively frame the support given to teen advocates from adult mentors and advocacy organizations. Here are a few key ways in which this theme played out.
Strategy vs. Community: A Difference In Emphasis
Talking to teens and adults engaged in youth advocacy spaces, I learned that tension lies between where these groups prioritize certain aspects of advocacy storytelling. Simply put, the adults I spoke to positioned advocacy mechanics (how to tell your story to push for change) as the most important lesson to teach young advocates through guidance and mentorship. While teens understood the great importance of advocacy mechanics, they viewed advocacy storytelling first and foremost as a way to connect with their community. In adult spaces, we might see belonging to a community as a positive consequence of advocacy storytelling further down the line. For teens, this sense of belonging is advocacy. They felt that actionable change could only come from fostering a rich community engaged in meaningful connection.
“Adultifying” Barriers
Oftentimes, when well-meaning adults take on mentor roles for teen advocates, they dive into structured lessons about how to deliver their story in the most effective way possible. While this might mean acknowledging large emotional reactions from teens as necessary fuel to their passion, adults often advise against behaving in stereotypical ‘childish’ ways that might stifle persuasion tactics for adult audiences (such as heightened emotionality or essentialization of political realities). Teens feel like their voices are muffled when this happens. Teens recognize that adult audiences need to be respected. Still, by altering the delivery of their advocacy story, they risk losing the central call to action of their advocacy goal (i.e., holding lawmakers accountable for their actions, allowing authentic teen voices to be heard in adult spaces, etc.).
Teens also expressed concern about autonomy when entering advocacy spaces. They shared similar experiences of ‘adultification’, where adults co-opted their advocacy goals to strengthen organizational metrics and appease donors. Teens shared with me that these experiences alienated them from the advocacy causes they cared about and the communities they longed to feel a part of.
Implications for Future Youth Support
From these interviews, I found the most important insight for bettering youth-adult advocacy partnerships is this: fostering safe environments where co-creation and identity exploration for teens is not only possible but encouraged. Because teen advocates are already a marginalized group, ensuring their passion for social justice is nurtured when entering adult spaces should be a top priority. Teens need to feel safe to explore advocacy work in ways that invigorate and sustain their passion and energy. This might mean setting aside pre-defined notions of what advocacy is and what success looks like for the nuanced pathways teens set forth.
Next Steps
While I am so sad my internship with LPA is coming to an end, I’d like to express my gratitude to LPA, all interviewees, and everyone along the way who made this work possible. My hope is that a journal article detailing the findings of this study will be published within the new year. Regardless, these insights have helped inform the future of LPA’s journey into the world of youth advocacy storytelling and what may come out of it.
I’d like to finish with a profound insight I learned from an interview with one of the teens:
I see, like, all over just social media [...] “youth are the leaders of tomorrow.” I think that's kind of misleading, especially because I think we should, in order to become said leaders of tomorrow, we also have to be leading right now and today.