Policymakers, practitioners and advocates seeking to improve the juvenile justice system have increasingly acted on calls from youth and their families to make “no decisions about us, without us.” These well-intentioned efforts have led to the proliferation of youth leadership councils, advisory boards and youth speakers’ bureaus — recognizing that some of the most effective emerging advocates and reform leaders are young people whose personal narratives can serve as a powerful catalyst for change.

Young people’s contributions to the public dialogue about systems reform are invaluable, adding a human element to often-clinical conversations about how best to serve youth and communities that are divorced from reality. Their lives and stories put into stark relief the consequences of our systems’ failures, and can move practitioners and policymakers to action much more effectively than the most compelling position papers or briefs. Those are the benefits of youth partnership and engagement for the systems. But seldom do we think and talk about — and far more seldom do we address — the costs and consequences for the youth we engage and partner with.

Plucking them temporarily out of challenging life circumstances, sometimes chaotic homes and communities, we invite them to conference rooms and podiums, and give them a microphone and an opportunity that may seem too good to pass up — to have adults listen with rapt attention. What happens after that, all too often, is the resumption of inattention. Not to the collective needs of the young people with system involvement, but to the individual needs of those we have anointed as spokespeople.

[For more on this story by Marie N. Williams, go to http://jjie.org/2018/01/02/you...partners-not-tokens/]