Collaborate or Volunteer

Collaborating, facilitating, or volunteering with Be About Change is not for everyone. We work in rooms with young people who are experiencing a number of challenges that are often beyond their control. Your expertise matters. But your expertise is a tool, not the purpose of the room. Facilitating means creating an environment for learning and striving to be a mirror to the strengths young people already possess.

Leadership succeeds when capability spreads beyond the leader.

Our programs are not designed around the facilitator’s fulfillment, recognition, or comfort. They are designed around the growth of the young people we serve. Young people are the protagonists. Period.

Facilitator Values

• Center the participant.
• Serve the system.
• Adapt without ego.
• Develop capability.
• Understand context without defining people by it.

1. Center the participant
You are not the hero. You use your experience, expertise, credibility, and story to help participants see more in themselves.

2. Serve the system
You understand you are part of something larger than your session. Respect all relationships, youth participants and families, program, curriculum, partners, roles, and shared purpose.

3. Adapt without ego
You read the room you have, not the room you expected. Earn attention, adjust approach, and do not confuse participant resistance with personal disrespect.

4. Develop capability
You measure success by what participants and other leaders become capable of doing without you. Share authority, develop others, make yourself progressively less necessary.

5. Understand context without defining people by it
You recognize that culture, family, race, neighborhood, socioeconomic conditions, access, opportunity, and lived experience can shape how young people experience the world. You seek to understand that context without reducing young people to demographics, deficits, hardship, or someone else’s assumptions about them.

Context informs how we serve. It does not define a young person’s identity, potential, choices, or future. We acknowledge barriers without teaching helplessness. We recognize inequity without making grievance the center of the relationship. We respect differences without stereotyping.

We do not impose political, ideological, or personal narratives on anyone.

Our role is to expand agency, capability, belonging, discernment, and opportunity.

What this looks like in practice

You can be confident without making yourself center.
You can command the room without needing the room to validate you.
You can share accomplishments without using status as a reason people should respect you.
You can disagree with process without needing to control it.
You can recognize a mistake without needing to take over.
You can work under leadership of someone less experienced or less credentialed when that is your role.
You can enter established relationships without trying to own them.
You can receive credit without needing more and contribute without receiving credit.
You can tolerate disorder, uncertainty, resistance, imperfect execution without making it about your comfort.
You understand control of room ≠ impact on room.
You accept that development happens on the participant's timeline, not the facilitator's.

Question: After you leave the room, should participants be thinking more about you, or thinking differently about themselves?
Answer: Themselves

Question: Can you convert frustration into contribution?
Answer: Observation —> Question —> Recommendation —> Ownership

Be About Change requires people whose mission is bigger than their personality.