Nearly every Sunday, a woman at Dr. Kimberlin Butler's church in Louisiana looked at her and told her she was born to win, designed for accomplishment and endowed with the seeds of greatness. A Head Start student who later relied on Pell Grants for college, she heard it so often that she came to believe it, and her work since has been about giving other young people that same sense of what is possible.
In this episode of Ronderings, Dr. Butler, founder of The L.E.A.D. Agency, a social impact firm, and creator of Youth-Possible Philanthropy, a framework for sharing real decision-making power with young people, talks about the difference between being heard and having influence.
She became a teacher through Teach For America, advised two US secretaries of education during the Obama administration, and led national work at Grantmakers for Education, a network of education funders. Again and again she saw institutions make decisions about young people with no young people in the room, including during the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal, when she was a funder asking who was caring for the students.
She describes the Tower Foundation's Community Experts Team, where young people with lived experience co-design the requests for proposals, score applications and decide how roughly $350,000 in grants is awarded, and explains why foundations need an x-ray rather than a mirror. She also tells the story of a young woman she calls Maya, celebrated on national stages while she was homeless in New York City, and describes the Youth-Possible Philanthropy Practice Network she is building to bring funders and young people together over three years.
Her Rondering is that the future does not simply belong to young people; it has to be shaped with them, because leadership grows when people are trusted with real responsibility, not once they have earned the right title.
- (01:47) - How Ron met Kimberlin on a search
- (03:03) - A story about possibility
- (03:19) - Head Start, Pell Grants and the McNair program
- (03:53) - A StoryCorps episode with Carl McNair
- (04:54) - Kim Possibilities on the other side of the tracks
- (06:13) - Teach For America and two secretaries of education
- (07:50) - The Atlanta Public Schools scandal
- (09:01) - Cradle to career work and a dissertation
- (10:19) - Kim Possible
- (10:58) - Mrs. Kay: born to win
- (12:43) - What the 40 Under 40 award unlocks
- (13:16) - What Youth-Possible Philanthropy is
- (14:34) - Youth voice versus youth power
- (18:01) - Six bodies of practice
- (21:39) - The Tower Foundation's Community Experts Team
- (24:39) - Answering the cynic: can this scale?
- (27:30) - An x-ray, not a mirror, and an MRI
- (28:35) - The skate park young people didn't want
- (29:52) - Asking young people, and why TikTok isn't for Ron
- (30:32) - Maya's story
- (34:20) - What has to change inside foundations
- (38:54) - The Youth-Possible Philanthropy Practice Network
- (41:58) - What's possible, not what's hard
- (44:01) - Ron's first human-centered design session
- (45:54) - Beyond surveys, and the moment she knew
- (47:57) - Kimberlin's Rondering: shaped with young people
- (49:50) - Where to find Kimberlin
- (51:32) - Doing more with less as funding shifts
- (54:54) - Defining possibility development
Referenced in this episode:
Links:
Episode 118
