Responsibility should be clear. Influence should be meaningful. Accountability should be visible.

YOUTHOOD works across organisations, professions, places and systems. That makes clarity about our own role especially important.

Our approach to governance and accountability is designed to make clear where responsibility sits, how different perspectives influence our organisation, what standards guide our work and how YOUTHOOD can be challenged when our practice does not match our commitments.

Governance tells us where responsibility sits. Standards shape how we exercise it. Accountability requires us to demonstrate whether we are living up to it.

How YOUTHOOD is governed

YOUTHOOD separates governance, executive responsibility and youth co-governance while creating deliberate relationships between them.

Our Governance Board holds formal responsibility for organisational governance, oversight and stewardship. It provides independent challenge and assurance across areas including mission, finance, safeguarding, compliance, organisational sustainability and accountability.

Our Chief Executive Officer and Core Staff hold responsibility for the leadership, management and delivery of YOUTHOOD's work within the authority delegated to them.

Our Youth Fellowship provides a standing route for youth co-governance, scrutiny and organisational accountability, ensuring young people can challenge and influence the organisation rather than only participate in its activities.

These responsibilities are deliberately different. Meaningful participation does not require pretending that every person holds identical authority. It requires being clear about who can decide, who must be heard, who can challenge and what happens in response.

meet our people

Youth Co-Governance - Young people should be able to influence the organisation, not simply its activities.

Youth participation at YOUTHOOD extends beyond asking young people for their views.

Through our Youth Fellowship Programme, young people aged 18–25 have a standing place within YOUTHOOD's accountability architecture. Youth Fellows can scrutinise areas of organisational work, contribute to strategic conversations, challenge assumptions and examine whether YOUTHOOD is meeting the commitments it makes to young people.

Co-governance does not mean removing the distinct legal responsibilities of our Governance Board or executive responsibilities of our staff. Instead, it means designing meaningful routes through which young people's influence can reach the places where organisational responsibility is exercised.

That requires more than access to a meeting.

It requires clear routes for challenge, expectations around organisational response, appropriate information, relationships with decision-makers and protection against youth participation becoming symbolic.

Our Organisational Accountability Framework provides the structure through which those relationships are maintained and reviewed.

A Board That Reflects the Change We Stand For

YOUTHOOD exists within a landscape in which responsibility for adolescence is already shared across young people, families, communities, professions, organisations, places and public institutions. We do not seek to own that landscape. Our role is one of developmental stewardship: helping strengthen the shared understanding, connections and infrastructure through which responsibility for youth development can be exercised more coherently. That stewardship works in two directions.

Connecting developmental understanding across systems and professional practice.
Young people do not experience education, health, social care, housing, youth services, community life and other parts of the youth-facing landscape as completely separate worlds. Their development happens through the interaction between them.
Different professions rightly bring different expertise, responsibilities and standards. Our role is not to replace those distinctions with a single professional model. It is to strengthen the developmental understanding that can exist between them, particularly where systems intersect around the same young person's life.
Bringing lived and professional knowledge into meaningful relationship.
Youth development cannot be understood through professional knowledge alone, nor does meaningful participation require professional knowledge to be displaced.
Young people experience adolescence as it happens. Professionals encounter adolescence through different forms of practice, evidence, responsibility and institutional knowledge.
YOUTHOOD creates structured ways for those perspectives to meet, challenge and deepen one another so that understanding is shaped by both evidence and experience.
Developmental stewardship therefore asks us to work across systems and across generations.

Being clear about our role.

We do not claim the same responsibility everywhere we contribute.

Working across a youth-facing landscape creates a risk for any organisation: being involved in something can gradually become confused with owning it. YOUTHOOD uses three distinct modes of responsibility to remain clear about the role we are taking.

These distinctions matter because collaboration should not make accountability less clear.

We should be able to explain not only what YOUTHOOD is involved in, but what responsibility we are actually taking for it.

Hold substantive responsibility for a defined area: initiate, coordinate, maintain and account for it.
Where YOUTHOOD leads, we accept responsibility for the purpose, integrity and ongoing stewardship of that work.
Provide a necessary organisational capability, control or infrastructure without owning the substantive purpose.
Where YOUTHOOD enables, our role is to make something possible or stronger while recognising that its underlying purpose or responsibility sits elsewhere.
Bring specialist knowledge, delivery capacity, scrutiny or support into work led elsewhere.
Where YOUTHOOD contributes, we participate without presenting ourselves as the owner of work for which another organisation, partnership or institution properly holds responsibility.

What You Can Expect From Us

Recognising young people as rights-holders and treating adolescence as a significant developmental period rather than approaching young people simply through service need, risk or institutional category.
Recognising that young people do not encounter the same opportunities, relationships, barriers or systems from the same starting point, and that fairness requires attention to those differences.
Creating credible routes between insight and influence rather than treating participation itself as evidence that power has been shared.

Creating environments in which participation, delivery, relationships and organisational activity are appropriately governed and safeguarded.
Being willing to test our assumptions, learn from evidence and experience, and change approaches that no longer meet the standards our mission requires.
Being open about what we are trying to achieve, what we are learning, where progress is difficult and where our organisation needs to improve.

YOUTHOOD asks organisations, places and national systems to think differently about shared responsibility for adolescence. We should expect the same discipline of ourselves.

That means knowing when to lead and when not to. Sharing influence without obscuring responsibility. Bringing professional and lived knowledge into meaningful relationship. Protecting standards even when doing so is difficult. And creating routes through which the organisation itself can be questioned.