Rangatahi Advisory Panel Update

Co-founder of FENWICK Group Izzy Fenwick

This month we spoke to Co-founder of the FENWICK Group, Izzy Fenwick, who we have partnered with to deliver a Rangatahi Advisory Panel with our Leading Partners.

Izzy provided an update on how the Rangatahi Advisory Panel work is going so far, lessons learned, and how others can bring an intergenerational perspective into their decision making.

What are some of the early lessons so far with bringing a Rangatahi perspective to decision-making? Have there been any barriers?

There is such a fine line between providing enough context and providing too much context for an advisory group, almost in any sense, but especially in a Rangatahi Advisory group. They are at a governance level to provide guidance from a sentimental, rather than technical perspective. We can’t expect them to be completely across the technical detail of a complex project, like the systemic change and adaptation work that the Circle does.

It’s their prerogative to find the bits that create the most value to them and for us to be a little less prescriptive about what we think they need and give them some options to determine what works best for them.

I think as we get older, we become a bit obsessed with ‘this is the process’ or ‘this is the information needed to do a job’. When you’re less institutionalised around those processes, sometimes it’s more about ‘give me some options around information and the level of detail, and there will be insights that come to me based on what I hear and learn’. We found with this that Rangatahi are more intuitive in the insights that come to them as they absorb different kinds of information.

What have decision makers seen so far, in terms of a youth voice, that you didn’t think they’d expect?

The first session that we had with the Rangatahi Advisory Panel was in the Agri-Adaptation workstream. We had a separate session with the RAP and Jack Keeys, who is a Director of Implementation at the Circle, taking them through some of the information around the climate scenarios and the Agri-Adaptation Roadmap action areas. Then we went away and had a discussion as a group, and I fed that back to the Leadership Group.

I was equal parts nervous and excited about giving the Leadership Group feedback because it was close to launch date and was pretty direct feedback. But the Leadership Group seemed to really love it, I could see lightbulb moments happening where they could see exactly what the Rangatahi Panel were demonstrating. In some instances, the Rangatahi were directly questioning ‘does that have to be there?’, and from what I could gather, the response from the Leadership Group was ‘actually no, it kind of doesn’t’.

The real value of the Rangatahi Panel is getting a perspective from a removed group. When you’ve been raised in such a radically different era, what is or isn’t normal or acceptable to you is ingrained at a belief system level, and so there were quite a few moments in the relaying of feedback to the Leadership Group where they were like ‘this is really bang on’, which was not a surprise, but was just so epic to see.  

Any advice on how Partners can meaningfully include a Rangatahi perspective in their own organisation?

I think one of the challenges about wanting to get Rangatahi perspectives in decision making within an organisation, is if the culture of the organisation doesn’t reflect value in that perspective, it doesn’t really matter what structure you try to wrap around it, you’re not going to really get the value that you want.

Whether I tell you to do one-on-one interviews, or groups sessions, or bring the Rangatahi into a senior leadership session, or have a separate Rangatahi Advisory Panel; none of those things are going to matter as much as fostering a culture within your organisation that sees personal and professional value beyond the number of years you’ve been alive or the number of years you’ve had experience in that job.

Once your culture is really reflective of that, those perspectives will come through in surprising moments! Whether it’s at the water cooler, or in structured sessions. The next step is to think about what are some of the session cadences or structures that we want to be intentional in, where we think about: what and who are the perspectives and stakeholders that we might want feeding into this workstream? This is where you might reach out more broadly to different generations, not just different departments.

What have the benefits been for the Circle so far in terms of the RAP and enabling intergenerational voices and a diversity of thought?

I think one of the benefits of enabling diversity of thought, especially generationally around issues like climate change or systemic change, and this is true for the Circle but also more broadly, is the benchmark about ambition in these areas.

I think enabling future generations to feed into The Aotearoa Circle’s work has enabled the Circle to continue to be as ambitious as it possibly can and see its role as a leader, not just as an entity that spits out information.

If we think about some of the principles from a te ao Māori perspective around tuakana-teina, that the older will lead the younger and the younger will lead the older, our leadership looks like doing the right thing and creating progress.  

The Aotearoa Circle really leaning into its role as a leader in this space means being brave enough to include other perspectives in the conversation, so we can say are we really being as bold as the current society or future generations needs us to be.

The RAP has so far had input into the development of the Agri-Adaptation Roadmap. How is this going to meaningfully show up in the work?

There were a couple of feedback moments that came from the session that were prescriptive, for instance, where the Rangatahi Panel said ‘you needed to change the order in which you tell this story, this is not the right story, the story we want to hear is this’. So, that is going to be tangibly reframed to reflect that Rangatahi perspective.

There were other elements which were more sentimental and less specific, which will be woven through the work, but will be harder to point at and say, ‘that’s what came from the Rangatahi’.  Because the Circle and the Leadership Group felt significant value from that feedback and recognised that weaving it through wasn’t going to a properly acknowledge the Rangatahi Advisory Panel for the insight that they were bringing, there will also be a tribute within the roadmap to feedback that they got holistically as well.

In doing this, the Circle really does want to demonstrate the value of Rangatahi perspectives, not just benefit from them, so being able to shift and change the roadmap to make it more powerful is great. By showing that we did this because Rangatahi said what we were doing wasn’t enough, is really celebrating the Rangatahi meaningfully.

How did Rangatahi from different industries feed in to the Agri-Adaptation roadmap?

This piece of work was completely Agri-focussed, and therefore only directly related to some of the Rangatahi members in terms of the positions they’re in now. Despite this it was incredible to see how the Rangatahi from organisations within different industries could clearly see the role that they could play, or that generations or society, needed to play, in bigger pictures like the agricultural system.

That’s one of the examples that showed me (which again isn’t a surprise to me) how brave and committed future generation are in trying to do what is right in these areas, because they were leaning into complex systems and contributing knowledge complex systems, despite not having the technical experience.