Youth Participation and Student Leadership: Activities for Young People to Lead
Activities for Young People to Be Protagonists, Not Spectators
On August 12, the International Day of Youth reminds us that young people are not the future — they are the present. Youth participation is not a pedagogical luxury: it is an urgent democratic necessity. This collection brings together participatory activities for young people to lead processes, make real decisions, generate proposals and act on their environment. They are useful for teachers, youth facilitators, student council coordinators and anyone working with young people in educational or community contexts.Why does youth agency require specific methodologies?
- Real information: Young people cannot opine or decide on what they don't know. Transparency is a prerequisite.
- Real impact: Youth opinions must have concrete consequences, not just be heard and filed away.
- Safe space for mistakes: Agency is learned by doing, and doing means making mistakes.
- Continuity: An isolated workshop does not generate agency; a sustained process over time does.
Types of activities for youth agency
Participatory leadership and youth facilitation
Leading is not commanding: it is serving the group to achieve its goals. These activities develop leadership skills in young people: facilitating meetings, moderating debates, managing conflict and making collective decisions.
The Ideal Leader
The Ideal Leader allows for the collective construction of an effective leadership profile, fostering reflection and group alignment.
Thematic Committees
Thematic Committees are working groups that analyze specific proposals in key areas, promoting informed and strategic decisions through active participation and collaboration.
Insight Exchange
Insight Exchange allows for the collection of rich perspectives as participants exchange ideas and reflect on shared experiences.
Role Simulation
Role Simulation is a participatory activity in which participants work in teams to create and act out different scenarios, exploring possible outcomes, dialogues, and decisions.
Evaluation wheel
The Evaluation wheel is a visual and participatory tool that allows for the evaluation and reflection on different aspects of a project or activity, facilitating collective analysis and improvement planning.
Student voice and civic participation
Before leading others, young people need to discover and trust their own voice. These activities create conditions for each participant to express themselves and experience that their ideas have real value and impact. Empowerment is not proclaimed — it is experienced in concrete situations where one's own voice produces visible changes.
Impromptu Speech
Impromptu Speech develops communication skills, quick thinking, and creativity through brief and spontaneous presentations on various topics.
Oxford Debate
Two teams argue opposing sides of a motion while the audience votes before and after. Measures each side's persuasion power and builds critical thinking and argumentation skills in any group.
Narrative workshop
Engage in a Narrative workshop to share stories, foster empathy, and build collective solutions. Ideal for team building, reflection, and creative problem-solving.
How Might We (HMW)
How Might We is a Design Sprint methodology that transforms pain points into positive, collaborative questions, guiding the team toward creative solutions.
Project bank
The Project Bank is a participatory activity for presenting, evaluating, and prioritizing proposals, fostering collaborative resource allocation and the strategic development of ideas.
Inquiry Workshop
Discover how the Inquiry Workshop fosters critical thinking and collective exploration by generating key questions that guide research, project design, and problem analysis.
Assemblies, debates and collective decision-making
Democracy is learned by practicing it. These activities practice collective deliberation: how to propose, how to argue, how to listen to opposing positions and how to commit to the group's decisions. They are the building blocks of student councils and school participation bodies.
Fishbowl discussion
Fishbowl is a participatory dynamic where a small group dialogues in the center while others observe, promoting active listening, multiple perspectives and deep reflection on complex topics.
Forum Theater
Engage in Forum Theater, a participatory method to explore social issues through performance. Empower communities, foster creative solutions, and promote collective action.
Confidence Vote
Confidence Vote is a fast participatory dynamic that lets groups gauge consensus, commitment levels, or uncertainty on a proposal by voting with hand signals or visual cues.
Dot Voting
Dot Voting is a participatory technique that combines analysis and prioritization to identify the most relevant proposals within a collective process, promoting collaboration and group consensus.
Heat Map Voting
Heat Map Voting is a visual and collaborative technique for prioritizing key aspects within a set of ideas by distributing multiple votes across specific elements.
Decision maze
The Decision maze guides participants through paths and challenges that simulate real decision-making processes, promoting critical and collaborative learning.
Social innovation and proposal generation
Young people have a unique capacity to imagine creative solutions to problems that adults consider unsolvable. These activities channel that energy toward generating concrete proposals: from improvements in the school space to community interventions.
5-Minute Ideas
Ideas in 5 Minutes is a rapid presentation activity that facilitates idea generation, knowledge sharing, and agile collaboration to address specific challenges.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming fosters collective creativity and collaboration by generating multiple proposals to address a specific challenge.
Crazy 8
Crazy 8 is a fast-paced brainstorming activity designed to spark creativity and generate innovative solutions by sketching eight ideas in eight minutes. Perfect for teams aiming to think outside the box!
Innovation Workshop
The Innovation Workshop fosters creativity and collaboration to generate novel solutions to specific challenges in a dynamic and participatory environment.
Yes, but...
Yes, but... is a brainstorming activity where participants explore creative reasons to avoid taking a specific action, using avoidance as a tool to analyze barriers and encourage critical thinking.
Participation for children and adolescents
Youth participation that doesn't include the youngest is not genuinely participatory. These activities adapt participatory processes to different ages and capacities, ensuring all voices can express themselves according to their own forms and possibilities.
Collective DIY Mascot
Collective DIY Mascot is a participatory activity in which a group builds a symbolic mascot together, adding one element at a time across weeks. The result is a creative, emotional representation of their collective identity.
I Like, I Wish, I Wonder
I Like, I Wish, I Wonder is a participatory activity where people reflect on a shared experience by expressing what they appreciated, what they would improve, and what questions they are left with, creating a space for honest feedback, learning, and connection.
Think – Pair – Share: Individual Reflection, Pair Dialogue, Group Sharing
A 3-step dynamic that activates everyone's participation: think alone, talk in pairs, share with the group. Guarantees equitable engagement in education, training, and facilitation at any scale.
Favorite Little Things
Favorite Little Things is a warm participatory activity that invites people to share the small everyday moments that bring them joy, building connection and appreciation within the group.
Treasure Hunt
The Treasure Hunt combines teamwork and challenge-solving to promote active learning and collaboration in an engaging, game-based format.
Who Am I?
Who Am I? is an observation and feedback-based activity where teams compete by imitating members of the opposing team, challenging them to guess who is being portrayed. It encourages creativity and strengthens group collaboration.
Theatre and artistic expression for youth action
Theatre, music and other forms of artistic expression have historically been the privileged forms of youth participation in Latin America. These activities use art as a political and pedagogical tool: to name what hurts, propose what is dreamed of and communicate what institutional language fails to express.
Human Sculpture
Human Sculpture fosters creativity and group reflection through the bodily representation of concepts or ideas.
Say It with Mime
Say It with Mime is a fun and collaborative activity where participants must act out words or phrases using gestures for their team to guess.
Mask Making
Mask Making is a creative and participatory activity where individuals design and create their own masks as a form of symbolic, artistic, or emotional expression. It is ideal for exploring identity, emotions, and cultural themes in educational, community, or therapeutic settings.
Puppets
Puppets is a creative dynamic where participants design and manipulate characters to explore themes, solve problems, or tell stories in a playful and reflective way.
Zine Creation
Zine Creation is an artistic and collaborative activity where participants design and assemble a small handmade publication, exploring a topic from multiple creative perspectives.
Strategies for Facilitating Genuine Youth Participation Processes
1. Distinguish real participation from decorative participation
- Minimum level (inform): Adults decide and tell young people what was decided.
- Medium level (consult): Adults ask young people's opinion before deciding.
- High level (co-decide): Adults and young people decide jointly with equal weight.
- Maximum level (self-governance): Young people decide autonomously in their own spaces.
2. Connect participation with real consequences
- Ensure the group's proposals have a real channel of impact.
- Communicate clearly what can and cannot change as a result of the process.
- Celebrate and make visible the concrete changes that resulted from youth participation.
3. Accompany without directing
- Offer scaffolding (support, information, tools) but don't make decisions for them.
- Tolerate the disorder, slowness and mistakes inherent in learning agency.
- Actively prepare your own exit: success is when young people can continue on their own.