To write that young people’s voices are important is not a particularly radical statement.

A fascination with and acknowledgment of youth culture is nearly ubiquitous in our daily lives. Everyone, from social media influencers and advertisers to political strategists, seeks to leverage the ingenuity, wit, creativity, optimism and imagination of young people. In the nonprofit and social sectors, voice has become a rallying cry — a value-laden proclamation brandished by policymakers, grantmakers and solutions builders — to communicate that they are both in touch with and listening to their constituents.

Most of this is purely performative. Most adults have very limited interactions with young people. If we are not educators or providers of direct services of which young people are the primary consumers or beneficiaries, most adults’ interactions with young people are often limited to our own children, the children of our friends and perhaps the young people in our immediate communities. From this, we extrapolate.

For an example of this, consider the generalizations made about millennials, or members of Gen Z. Our conversations or interactions with a small group of young people inform our sense of who young people are as a generation, how they are experiencing the world, what aspirations they hold for their own lives, and what steps toward those aspirations can and should look like.

Based on this small sample size, we may believe that young people are capable, resourceful, optimistic and full of agency. Or we may believe that young people are ill-equipped and uninformed, unable to make decisions, or subjects that need to be acted upon.

We have a problem of scale. Without an evidence base that describes life experiences, identities, geographies and education pathways different from our own, we can continue to assume that the young people we happen to know best are representative of youth as a whole. In the United States, where our lives become increasingly segregated by race, education, income, neighborhood and school, opportunities to immerse ourselves in the stories of people whose experiences differ from our own are few and far between.

An argument for immersion

In strategic communications, it doesn’t matter whether a narrative is factually inconsistent or false. It matters whether people believe it is true.

So how do we counter perceptions of what is true about young people of color and young people from households with lower incomes? Proximity.

When we immerse ourselves in young people’s words and ideas, we become directly engaged with youth. We hear and feel how young people understand their emerging identities, and we see how they experience and assign meaning to events along their education journeys. As we listen, our perception of the world — what knowledge is valuable, what problems need to be solved and by whom, what success looks like, and how adults can show up in young people’s lives — risks changing. And it’s true; we adults don’t always have the time, resources or appetite for change.

My new book, “How We See Us: Young People Imagining a Path to Their Futures,” seeks to bring educators, policymakers, researchers and other adults working to make our systems and institutions more equitable into closer proximity with young people.

I invite readers to immerse themselves, as I have, in the voices of young people whose stories informed the Striving to Thriving research, which included in-depth interviews, surveys, and focus groups of nearly 4,000 students from Black and Hispanic communities and low-income households in urban and rural regions across the United States. I urge readers to consider what they can do to more authentically and intentionally center a greater diversity of young people’s voices in their work.

The structure of the book provides three different levels at which we can listen to young people’s experiences, perceptions and expectations of education and work. First, we meet four young people growing up and making sense of their experiences and the world in dramatically different parts of the United States; then, we listen to young people as members of a group describing their experiences and expectations of jobs, work and career. We explore the unintended impacts of the focus group methodology on the youth participants and on me, as a moderator. Then I share guidance for how you can use these frameworks and insights from the research to transform your own work and develop or improve your own listening practice.

Read from cover to cover, this book intends to provide a counter to the narratives of crises Black and Hispanic young people, in particular, are forced to endure. In thinking about a title, I was inspired by the Ava Duvernay film “When They See Us,” which heartbreakingly depicts how the white gaze brutally and irreparably changed the lives of five Black teen boys in New York. By foregrounding the narratives that young people, in particular Black and Hispanic young people hold for and about themselves, the book offers a vision of young people as they see themselves, not solely as how we as adults see them.

In a sense, within the pages of the book, young people become the “we,” the ones whose gaze is valued and whose perspective and knowledge the reader is asked to consider. “How We See Us” aims, if only briefly, to allow young people the space, and pages, to be authors of their own stories.

Excerpted with permission from How We See Us: Young People Imagining a Path to Their Futures, by Michaela M Leslie-Rule, August 2025, published by Harvard Education Press.

This post was originally published on Next City.