Young people don't need to be taught to see injustice. They need to be seen.
By Kendra Nicolai, Director of Program and Operations, Milaan Foundation
During our Boys and Girls Club pilot of The Becoming Initiative, something became clear within the first few sessions that has stayed with us.
When we asked participants to identify problems in their community, the answers came immediately: gun violence, lack of safe spaces, bullying, racism, stereotyping, suicide, or self-harm. These young people had a precise, fluent awareness of what was wrong in their neighborhoods, named from daily life.
Then we asked a different question: what are you good at?
The room slowed. The most common answer was some version of “good at football.” It took one-on-one conversations to get underneath that ceiling and to find what was actually there. Fast, strong, a good communicator, dedicated, hard-working: the strengths existed, fully formed, but what was missing was the language and the invitation to name them.
That gap makes sense once you see the two as different cognitive tasks. Naming a community problem is pattern recognition applied to constant external input, things the environment rehearses daily through lived experience, through what adults around them discuss, through media that overwhelmingly frames their neighborhoods in deficit terms. When a young person’s nervous system has had to stay alert to real threats, threat-detection becomes fast and fluent by necessity. Self-appraisal is a completely different task. It is internal, reflective, and it requires someone to have first modeled the vocabulary, and then asked the question in a space that felt safe enough to answer honestly. Most of these participants had never been asked what they were good at in a way that expected more than a hobby-level answer.
A teenager who can name five injustices in their neighborhood but cannot identify one specific strength is not primed for agency. Awareness without a felt sense of your own capability tends to become “this is just how it is” rather than “I can do something about this.” The identity and strengths work in the Becoming Initiative is what converts fluent problem-naming into actual agency. See the problem, know you are capable, and then act.
We saw what that looks like in practice with our Grand Rapids cohort, where young women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds spoke openly together about implicit bias, explicit bias, and systemic racism, navigating a genuinely difficult conversation with maturity and depth alongside peers who experience it in different ways and at different levels. The Becoming Initiative is designed to create exactly that kind of space, and moments like that one reflect how far this cohort has come.
If you are ready to unlock your inner power and build on your values, strengths, and leadership skills, this program is for you.
We’re continuing to document what we’re learning across Becoming Initiative cohorts. From the moments that surprise us to the conversations that stay with us. The insights that sharpen how we think about youth leadership and what young people actually need. More reflections from our sessions are coming soon.
