Illustration by Adriana Crespo

JOSHUA LAVRA: Welcome, Lydia! Let’s start with something straightforward. Could you describe your organization and your work in a few sentences?

LYDIA BURNS: Sure. Seek Common Ground is an organization that supports networks of leaders across the country. We're a small, three-person team that supports community leaders to identify and implement solutions to the big problems of the day. I run our Student Action Network for Equity (SANE), which is a program focused on building a network of student-led and intergenerationally-led organizations that work on multiracial democracy and racial justice.

JOSHUA: Could you give some examples of what those big problems might be that young people in your network are tackling?

LYDIA: Yeah, sure. A lot of young people we’re working with right now are grappling with what it feels like to be in school during this new administration—when there are attacks on public education, attacks on migrant or undocumented students, on LGBTQ students. They are asking questions like: What does it mean to be in school right now? How are students taking action to address the problems that they're facing? And, how can we support that where it's happening?

JOSHUA: I love that your work is so responsive to what’s needed right now. How did you get started?

LYDIA: We started in 2021, which is when the anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) movement took off. We were seeing a lot of students speak out against book bans and anti-CRT legislation, and we wanted to find and support those students—so they were not just speaking on behalf of themselves, but could also build infrastructure to bring other students into the conversation and speak as a collective

JOSHUA: Naturally a lot has changed since then, for better and for worse. How has the work evolved over that time?

LYDIA: It's grown a lot. We started with just three organizations, and I’m an alum of one of them—Kentucky Student Voice. I was doing local work, and then I started at Seek Common Ground in 2021 specifically to run this project where we're connecting youth-led organizations. Since then, we have grown this network to be about 90 organizations—which is huge!

JOSHUA: Wow - that’s incredible.

LYDIA: We do a lot of technical assistance, networking, and programming, but we also provide funding. There are several organizations that now have hundreds of members and large budgets that only exist because we were their first funders. One example is the Seattle Student Union. We found them off the heels of some press they received for a mass protest they organized in response to a school shooting—about 3,000 students walking out of their schools calling for increased mental health services on campus. When we found them, we were like, “This is great—how can we help them build something big and meaningful that sticks around for a while?” We were able to give them $10,000 to get that program off the ground.

JOSHUA: I love that story because that initial investment you made allowed them to continue their work and eventually mobilize tens of millions of dollars in funding for mental health in Seattle schools. What an incredible example of what seed funding and support can do.

LYDIA: Yeah, they're great—but also just one example. We have other organizations that we have helped grow that way too: Students Engaged in Advancing Texas and the National Student Board Member Association. We gave them both their first 501(c)(3) funding.

JOSHUA: I would love for you to say more about your funding approach. First, I wonder if you could give a quick definition of participatory grantmaking? I am not sure everyone knows what that actually means in practice…

LYDIA: Sure! So when you're doing grant making, you're trying to help find and fund solutions to some problem. In participatory grantmaking, you're trying to include the people who are most impacted by those problems and giving them a seat at the decision-making table, so that you're making sure you're putting money in places that will be most helpful based on what communities themselves see as priorities and possible solutions.

We've been funding youth for as long as we've been around, and we do it in this really unique and exciting way where we include students as decision makers and pay students to participate in the process—it’s pretty unique and I'm so proud of it. To date, we've given out about $700,000 to student-led and intergenerationally-led organizations through various rounds of our participatory process.

JOSHUA: You’ve definitely helped us become more participatory, and ensure we’re not just a bunch of adults trying to make decisions for young people about where resources should go.

I'm curious about your experience being a young leader at an intergenerational organization. What should people know about how to make that work?

LYDIA: Power sharing is a huge thing, and I think my organization does it really well. I mean, every organization is intergenerational in some way—you might have a 24-year-old program associate on your staff, but that's very different from letting that 24-year-old have real agency and control in the decision making of the organization.

When I started leading the Student Action Network for Equity, I was straight out of college. I was a young person myself. And, I had a ton of autonomy over my program. Now I'm 27, so I don't have the same experience as a 16-year-old who's in school right now—I’m a decade older. So, my organization has given me a really good example for how to run my program in a way that respects the expertise of younger folks—like the part-time people on our staff who are still in school themselves.

JOSHUA: Totally. I love that. So, if you were to give advice to a young person who is interested in taking action in their community, but isn’t sure where to start—what would you offer? How might they take the first steps?

LYDIA: I think it's 100% about building your community—talking to your friends, talking to people at your school, talking to people at the school next door about similar challenges that you have. If all of you can come together on something, it doesn't even matter what “it” is. For example, we worked with some students at a really small school in rural Indiana who had a non-binary friend in their class. There was one single-stall, gender neutral bathroom in the whole school, and it was in the office. And they were like, “Hey, let our friend use that bathroom—there's only one of them.” The school told them no, but they eventually got six students together to attend the School Board meeting to request an adjustment to the rules. It worked!

So I guess that's my advice: find what's annoying you and then find other people who care about it.

JOSHUA: That’s great advice. What’s on the horizon for you? Anything specific you’re focused on in the coming months?

LYDIA: Right now, we're really focused on helping young people respond to challenges in their state legislatures. There are attacks on all kinds of students—in Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas to name a few. We want to make sure our students are prepared to go into those spaces. Like, last night we had a call to learn about how schools and communities are protecting undocumented students. We heard from some students in Texas who had raised the topic at a local meeting, and it led to a meaningful conversation with their school community. So that was really great.

Also, there are students we know involved in lawsuits, and it can be hard to navigate that new space. Since we know multiple people who are engaged in similar tactics, we want to make sure they're connected to and learning from each other—and that it's making all of our work stronger.

JOSHUA: To be in community when you're dealing with something like that feels incredibly helpful—and probably hard to find if we’re being honest!

Last question: if there is one way that people reading this can support your work, what would it be?

LYDIA: Easy—if you see student movements that are happening organically, connect them to us. We would love to help support them in any way we can, and to connect them to our national network of young people. There are so many people in our network who are eager to meet others like them—folks in isolated communities who often feel like they're the only ones doing the work they’re doing.

JOSHUA: Hell yeah.

If you enjoyed this conversation, check out our conversations with all five young leaders from the RTYPF Steering Committee.