Healing as Leadership: Reimagining Youth Development Through a Liberation Lens
I remember sitting in a circle with our young people after a particularly powerful healing session. The room still held the energy of their truth-telling—stories of resilience, of survival, of dreams deferred but not abandoned. One youth leader, Kira, looked at me with eyes that held both wisdom and question: "Why do other programs keep trying to fix us instead of seeing us?" In that moment, her 16-year-old insight crystallized what has taken me years of unlearning to articulate.
What we are witnessing in the field of youth development is not merely a gap in methodology but a fundamental philosophical chasm that reveals how deeply colonial thinking has shaped our understanding of leadership. This disconnect became painfully evident during our recent program evaluation, where the young people's enthusiastic testimony stood in stark contrast to the puzzled expressions of certain funders and institutional partners who questioned, sometimes explicitly, "But where is the leadership development?"
Their confusion speaks volumes about the violence of dominant frameworks that reduce leadership development to a set of measurable competencies, behavioral adaptations, and performances of professionalism divorced from cultural context and collective healing. These approaches demand that our youth—particularly Black and Brown young people from communities fractured by structural violence—contort themselves into shapes recognizable to systems that were never designed for their thriving.
At YMAN, we hold a different truth: healing is leadership development. Love is mentorship. Affirmation is empowerment. These are not complementary elements to "real" leadership training; they are its very foundation. As Audre Lorde reminds us, self-care (and I would add, community care) is not self-indulgence but self-preservation, and "self-preservation is an act of political warfare." When our young people engage in collective healing practices, they are not taking a detour from leadership—they are embodying its most revolutionary form.
The most vulnerable youth in our communities already shoulder immense burdens of navigating systems of harm while processing personal and historical trauma. To then impose upon them "improvement" metrics based on standards they had no hand in creating reproduces the very dynamics of oppression we claim to address. This approach reinforces the toxic belief that their worth is tied to their capacity to adopt behaviors valued by dominant culture, rather than affirming the brilliance, resistance strategies, and cultural wealth they already possess.
I think about Jamal, who entered our space carrying both the weight of three school suspensions and extraordinary gifts as a peace-maker in his neighborhood. Traditional programming would have focused on "correcting" his school behavior without recognizing how his de-escalation skills on his block represented sophisticated leadership capacities. At YMAN, our approach centered affirming these gifts while creating space for him to heal from the educational trauma he'd experienced. Two years later, he's not only thriving academically but leading restorative justice circles in his school.
That our students "really enjoyed" our program while adults "struggled to see the value" reveals precisely where transformation is needed. The young people recognized authentic care when they experienced it. They felt the profound difference between being fixed and being held, between being treated as problems and being embraced as visionaries.
Our work isn't about preparing youth to survive toxic systems—it's about creating microcosms of liberation where they can heal from systemic harm while practicing new ways of being in relationship with themselves and each other. Through this healing-centered approach, they develop not just the capacity to navigate unjust systems but the radical imagination to envision and create more just alternatives.
This is leadership development at its most profound—not merely managing oppressive conditions but transforming them through collective care, critical consciousness, and the courage to imagine worlds beyond what currently exists. What our young people experienced wasn't peripheral to leadership development—it was its essence, its heart, its revolutionary core.
