When Ashley Priore ran for a seat on the Pittsburgh Public School Board last year, she was 19 years old. While she didn’t win the election, the experience only strengthened her goal of putting young people in leadership positions. Now, Priore has launched Y’22: A Youth on Boards Movement with the goal of diversifying the board membership of organizations around the city, specifically when it comes to age.
“It really started with an idea in 2018, thinking, ‘How do we get people under 25 in leadership positions? And why are there so many barriers?’” says Priore.
Her initial goal is to get someone under 25 years old (her definition of young) on the boards of every nonprofit in the city, with an eventual goal of having one person under 25 on every board in Pittsburgh by 2022 (hence the name Y’22). Priore says she feels that nonprofits are a good starting point because of how many there are in the city, and how often they cater to youth.
Like any instance of a room lacking diversity, a dearth of young people in board rooms is an issue of people in one group discussing what’s best for another group who is absent from their decision-making.
“They say, ‘OK, what would young people want?’ And they’re making assumptions. For me, it’s like you don’t have to conspire or think about what they might say. You can just have them in this conversation,” says Priore. “If there is a nonprofit specializing in afterschool programming, having a young person on there … they can really answer questions that only fellow young people can.”
This age discrepancy is not exclusive to Pittsburgh, but it could be indicative of a larger trend of young people starting to feel an urgent need to take action and being told to wait until they’re older. Priore points to Greta Thunberg and other teen activists who are criticized, even from their supporters, for taking action instead of staying in school. As any young person could tell you, youth today aren’t growing up in a world that promises them a stable future.
“I think this represents a larger issue of millennials versus Gen Z,” says Priore. “I’m kind of concerned about the future of that [dynamic] because I’m really not sure when or if we’ll be able to work together right now and this is a time when we all need to work together.”
Responses to Y'22 from nonprofit organizations have been mixed, with some disagreeing, and others supporting the idea, but only in theory. The real test, she says, is whether or not anyone actually follows through.
“I think that’s a reachable goal cause we’re just asking for one person,” she says.
Y'22 is a new movement to put young people in Pittsburgh's board rooms
