With $900K, what causes would teens support? This nonprofit put that to the test.

Burnout, low pay and shrinking support for social programs may be driving young people away from the nonprofit sector. But a new pilot program from Boston-based American Student Assistance is giving them renewed purpose.

The Youth-Led Grantmaking Initiative puts high school juniors and seniors in charge of awarding nearly a million dollars to local youth-serving nonprofit organizations, learning how philanthropy works from the inside out.

The initiative is designed to give teens a real voice in shaping their communities and a firsthand look at careers in social impact, all while driving the next generation of changemakers in and around Boston.

That’s why we’re celebrating the inaugural program on this week’s Joy Beat. ASA’s President and CEO, Julie Lammers, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Arun Rath: It’s really refreshing, at a time when young people are feeling priced out of public service jobs, you’re helping to ease them into this world of philanthropy. What was the thinking behind this? How did this come about?

Julie Lammers: Well, it was partially led by our mission at American Student Assistance, and partially just led by the need we were seeing in the community. American Student Assistance is a national nonprofit based right here in Boston, and our focus is on ensuring young people — no later than middle school — have an understanding of their career opportunities and can navigate to post-secondary education and career success.

For us, that means giving kids the opportunity at a much earlier age to think about their career trajectory, to begin to understand themselves and their interests, and to begin to build real-life skills. Opportunities to help you understand what you love as much as what you might not like, so you can better chart a course to success.

We had launched a high school internship program a number of years ago, and our high school interns were part of the process as we did our philanthropy work. We give out about $20 million a year in philanthropy nationwide. So we leaned on our high school interns to say: “What do you think about these programs? Are they appropriate? Is this something you’d be interested in participating in?”

And we got a lot of insight from our students. It was often very different from what we, as practitioners in the philanthropy community, were actually giving out.

So we decided to launch this program last year. It’s an effort to not only give young people the opportunity to build skills around philanthropy, grantmaking and social impact, but also to really drive our own philanthropic initiatives. To give students a true voice in decisions that were being made — not just asking for their opinion, but actually putting them in charge of the process.

That’s really where it launched from. It has been a wonderful opportunity to understand what students really want and need when it comes to career-readiness programming. It’s been a lot of fun.

Rath: That’s so fascinating, because I’m familiar with other programs that give young people a voice, but you give them a vote. What was the thinking behind that, and what have you learned so far?

Lammers: We’ve always asked their opinion, right? This time, we decided: What would happen if adults stepped out of the process? Would the outcomes be similar, or would they find opportunities they believed were more impactful for youth?

So we provided a program that allowed about 16 juniors and seniors from 11 high schools across Massachusetts the opportunity to have this three-month experience to learn about the philanthropy process and grantmaking.

They developed rubrics, reviewed proposals and went through the process of reading and evaluating proposals. They were paid for their work — it was a paid experience, so they understood the value of what they were doing.

We decided that it was more important to really ensure that they were deeply involved in the process, not just a bystander — one person giving an opinion then being drowned out by eight other adults in the room. It was really, truly driven and led by students.

They were given a pot of about a million dollars. In the end, the students picked three really high-impact programs they felt best served the needs of students in the way they would want to be served.

Rath: These were the nonprofits that focused on health care, biotech and career readiness, right?

Lammers: Yes. There was an organization specifically focused on helping young people explore careers and then choose high schools in Boston a little bit more deliberately. If you think about the variety of high school choice programs in Boston, some focus on health care careers or STEM. But middle school students who haven’t had a chance to explore their interests might not necessarily know how to choose those opportunities. So this nonprofit, One Bead, is focused on helping with that.

Codman Square Health Center is looking to expand access to health care careers.

And the BioBuilder Educational Foundation is really for hands-on experience in biotech — how do we expose more young people to those careers?

What we learned from the students was a few key things that really change how we think about philanthropy. We tend to think about all of the innovation that is happening in philanthropy — particularly since the pandemic, where we see a lot of digital tools that are facilitating greater access to career-connected learning, virtual internships.

But the youth in our pilot were really looking for in-person opportunities, and in-person authentic connections. They were really looking for programs that blended real-world learning with community impact. They wanted organizations that were trying to make a difference. So it’s shaped, for us, the value of not just youth at the table, but really sharing in the solutions that are being generated from the work that we’re doing.

Courtesy of American Student Assistance (ASA)

Rath: We’ve seen in philanthropy, not to be critical, but the grant process can be complicated. Biases can be introduced. Do these young voices help bring in something that might get missed otherwise?

Lammers: We think they certainly do. We spent a lot of time talking to youth about some of those biases that occur and talking about equity in the grantmaking process.

What we see quite a bit is gatekeeping when it comes to philanthropy — social capital is a real challenge. You might not be able to access philanthropic capital if you don’t know who to reach out to, or to have a connection with someone that might connect you to a funder. So that is a huge challenge that we see a lot of organizations facing when they’re trying to understand how to navigate the philanthropic community.

What we did in this case was: We had a group of students nominate organizations in their local communities. So instead of waiting for organizations to come to us, we actually went to a list of organizations that some of our students that we serve have worked with over the years, have been impacted by or could recommend to us. So we had a list that was kind of opposite to the way the philanthropic world works. We were trying to lower some of those access barriers.

Rath: And now that you’ve gone through this process, what are you hearing from the young people? How has it changed their thinking?

Lammers: I’m not sure we have anyone that has said philanthropy is definitely their future career! But we do have young people that feel very strongly that they have gained a lot of really valuable skills through the process. They really appreciated having their voice heard because a lot of them, often, don’t feel as though adults are really listening.

And so, not only were we listening in this process, we were empowering them to go and do something.