The structural challenges facing youth-led organisations
In the first part of this reflection series, I explored why youth-led organisations matter, why young people should be treated as legitimate contributors to policymaking and civic life, and why meaningful youth empowerment strengthens society as a whole.
But if this vision is truly to become sustainable, then we must move beyond inspiration alone and confront a more difficult question:
Why do so many youth-led organisations struggle to survive, grow, and sustain their impact?
The reality is that youth-led think tanks and organisations often operate under significant structural constraints that remain largely invisible from the outside. Behind every successful event, publication, policy brief, conference, or advocacy initiative lies an enormous amount of unpaid work, coordination, emotional investment, and institutional uncertainty.
One of the most persistent challenges is continuity. Unlike traditional institutions, youth-led organisations exist within ecosystems defined by constant transition. Students graduate. Volunteers find professional jobs. Leadership teams change rapidly. Entire groups of experienced members may disappear within the span of a single academic year, often taking with them institutional memory, operational knowledge, professional networks, and ongoing projects.
This is precisely why external support structures matter so deeply. Mentorship, institutional partnerships, structured onboarding processes, and opportunities for inter-organisational learning can significantly reduce knowledge loss and continuity challenges that so many youth-led initiatives struggle with.
Closely connected to this is the challenge of voluntary participation. Most youth-led initiatives depend heavily on individuals contributing alongside studies, work obligations, financial pressures, and personal responsibilities. Passion and idealism can drive extraordinary commitment, but they cannot fully eliminate exhaustion, burnout, or limited time.
Another major challenge lies in transforming ideas into concrete outputs. Youth-led organisations are often spaces overflowing with creativity and ambition. Yet moving from enthusiasm to implementation requires governance systems, project management capacities, and long-term strategic planning that are difficult to maintain within volunteer-driven structures.
Leadership itself also carries hidden costs that are rarely acknowledged openly enough. In many youth-led organisations, a relatively small number of highly committed individuals end up carrying disproportionate responsibilities: managing partnerships, coordinating teams, ensuring operational continuity, applying for funding, organising events, and maintaining institutional credibility.
Addressing these challenges requires moving beyond symbolic encouragement toward tangible structural support. Funding opportunities, training initiatives, mentorship programs, and platforms for knowledge exchange, such as those provided by the OTT’s Building for the Future initiative, can dramatically strengthen the sustainability of youth-led organisations.
At the same time, youth-led organisations frequently face a deeper external challenge: legitimacy.
Despite increasing rhetorical commitments to youth participation, many institutional and policy environments still struggle to treat youth-led actors as fully credible partners. Young organisations are often welcomed symbolically, invited to discussions or consultations, yet excluded from meaningful influence over decision-making processes.
Who gets to be heard?
Simultaneously, it is also important to recognise that youth participation is not experienced equally across the world.
Through our collaborations with youth organisations and partners from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other regions, I have increasingly come to understand how profoundly unequal the global landscape of youth empowerment still remains.
As a Europe-based think tank, we initially focused many of our discussions on questions of policy impact and institutional inclusion. But for many of the young people we engaged with, these questions often felt far more distant.
In some contexts, the challenge is not how young people can influence policy discussions, but whether spaces for youth participation exist at all. For many youth-led organisations in low- and middle-income countries, the more immediate concerns are access to education, placement opportunities, basic institutional support, civic space, or even the ability to operate safely and sustainably in the first place.
These conversations reminded us that youth empowerment cannot be approached through a single universal framework shaped primarily by European institutional realities. It requires recognising that organisations operating in different social, political, and economic contexts possess forms of knowledge and legitimacy that externally driven approaches often overlook. Working across regions requires genuine partnership with locally rooted organisations and a willingness to adapt priorities according to local realities. Yet these organisations often remain underrepresented within global policy discussions and donor ecosystems.
This creates a very real risk that global youth participation spaces unintentionally reproduce the same inequalities they seek to challenge, where internationally mobile, university-educated, English-speaking youth become disproportionately visible while many other perspectives remain marginalised.
Ultimately, meaningful youth empowerment is not only about increasing participation. It is also about redistributing trust, visibility, resources, and decision-making power more equitably.
Beyond fragmentation
This tension emerged repeatedly throughout discussions at the OTT Conference on the future of youth-led think tanks, where colleagues from organisations such as the Leeds Policy Institute, the Student Network for Open Science, and EPIS Think Tank reflected on the difficulties of balancing professionalisation, sustainability, institutional integration, and independence.
Particularly important was the question of how youth-led organisations can become more meaningfully integrated into policymaking ecosystems without losing the very qualities that make them valuable in the first place: flexibility, innovation, openness, and the ability to challenge established assumptions. At the same time, many discussions highlighted that the long-term impact and sustainability of youth-led initiatives also depend on stronger ecosystems of trust, cooperation, and institutional support.
Yet recognising these challenges is only the first step. If questions of sustainability, legitimacy, continuity, and representation are shared across youth-led organisations worldwide, perhaps the solutions cannot be found in isolated efforts alone. The more important question is what comes next: how can we build the ecosystems that allow youth-led organisations not only to survive, but to thrive?
In the final part of this reflection series, I explore what a stronger future for youth-led think tanks and youth participation could look like.