Boards need Gen Z

My first response to the question is that people are scared because things might get too good. Young people are advocating for more rest, for four-day weeks, more robust policies, meeting access needs and even saying things out loud like: “I don’t enjoy work”.

Young people aren’t just naming the elephant in the room, they’re demanding he be set free into the wilderness. If your governance depends on the elephant – by which I mean unsustainable, white supremacist, capitalist, colonial ways of working – then you might be the person who says things like: “Young people are so angry these days”, “They don’t have the patience for governance”, “Too much screen time, no attention span”.

I’m being facetious, but these are things I hear on a regular basis.

Diversify governance

Recently I was invited to speak at a Clore Leadership event: Diversifying Governance. It was timely because of the release the same week of a joint report from the Charity Commission and ProBono Economics, the first since 2017, detailing the demographics of trusteeships in the last eight years.

Young people – meaning under 30s – still comprise less than 1% of trustee roles in England and Wales. Other key findings include that the average age of a trustee has a gone up from 60-62, to 65-69, and over half (54%) of all trustees are retired.

I’m grateful to Clore for providing a space in which to challenge traditional governance models and build momentum for change. The day I attended focused on young people in governance: how to recruit them, how to empower them, how to retain them and how to genuinely share power with them.

What I didn’t expect was having to advocate for young people to be on boards at all.

Boards are not ready

I often support organisations to think about empowering marginalised people in strategic decision-making roles and, on the whole, teams ask caring things. For example, how can we ensure someone doesn’t carry the burden of representing all people of colour, or what does tangible inclusion look like for disabled people in policy?

But when it came to young people, as opposed to other underrepresented groups, it seemed boards weren’t ready. They thought that, if young people were recruited other trustees might leave; that young people wouldn’t understand what’s going on; that they might cause a ruckus.

I could sense people were nervous about the conflict that might arise if they appointed young people. But if a board only entertains the status quo and doesn’t make space for challenge, why have one?

There were a few attendees who seemed genuinely curious and excited about meaningful power sharing with young people but I left the event with the overwhelming sense that people were fearful. Fearful of upsetting young people, fearful of coddling them, fearful of being out of touch.

Low appetite for risk

Appetite for risk is low at the moment: no funding, every crisis imaginable, world burning, exhaustion… the list goes on. It’s no surprise then that, according to the report, only one in 17 trustees has been appointed through an open access advert. The rest were approached as colleagues and friends.

I understand people might want to turn to allies and friends in rough times, rather than create another space of challenge and conflict. But governance is the essential space for challenge to take place so that all the other spaces can thrive.

Currently, boards aren’t built for disruption. The meetings last about two hours, with policies to review and accounts to sign off and not a whole lot of time to address the ‘”hang on a minute, the whole thing is gonna crumble unless we address systemic injustice” during AOB.

Don’t assume young people are ignorant

Gen Z, to which I belong, was at school during Black Lives Matter, the pandemic and a long line of Prime Ministers. We’ve grown up with the language and tools to address inequality, protest, accountability and justice. Shouldn’t we be applauding our good luck to have a generation that gets it? Don’t boards require critical thinking?

In one session I was asked: “What sort of marketing materials should I use to reach young people”; another attendee interrupted to say: “Just definitely don’t use the word governance, they don’t understand it and they won’t get it.”

It’s true a lot of the language of governance is exclusionary and inaccessible but to confidently declare the ignorance of all young people – at a session on governance led by a young person – well, it made me sad.

And to speak over the only young person in the room at a session dedicated to empowering youth voice wasn’t lost either. The young people I’ve supported into board roles are compassionate, energised, empathetic, fierce, skilled, engaged and insatiably creative.

While you can’t teach the older generation the lived experience of young people, you can teach young people how to use a risk register – and all the jargon that goes with it – probably within twenty minutes.

We need ‘radical dreaming’

That day, another attendee joked that in a junior position you couldn’t ask your manager to pop off to a board meeting. Everyone laughed: imagine an employee in an entry level role being sufficiently respected to have time out to impact change at an organisational level?

The joke exemplified how inaccessible board roles are for young people, as they would not be allowed the time off work. But even ignoring the fact more junior people have less agency over their calendars – a genuine barrier – it brought up how surprising and laughable it seems for a young person to leave work to go to a board meeting.

Working at somewhere like Rising Arts Agency, surrounded by radical dreaming, where policies make sense and human leaders listen to you and speak honestly, it’s easy to forget that elsewhere in the sector the bar is in hell.

We call it the Rising effect. Our programme OnBoard, which has recruited 43 young trustees in the last seven years, has had the Rising effect on me. I have become so accustomed to young people in governance that I forgot for a moment we have such a painfully long way to go.

I started at Rising when I was 24. I had never considered joining a board or any leadership role. Now I’m waking up, writing an article governance and becoming a trustee for Deptford X, an organisation that is thinking about governance differently, is ready to talk about the elephant and where I feel heard. The radical thing Rising did was to tell me I could do it.

If you’re feeling energised by the idea of young people making real decisions, get in touch at [email protected]