The Intergenerational Triangle: A Guide to Shared Leadership
At the World YWCA, we believe that leadership must be shared to be just. It must be intergenerational to be lasting. And, it must be authentic and accountable to be transformative. We are living in a time that demands bold imagination and collective courage. In and across every corner of the world, young women, girls, and women of all generations reimagining systems of power.
People are looking for just, lasting and transformative changes in power structures. We heard this for years, from all sectors, genders, and identities that witnessed YWCA working intergenerationally. So, we decided to try to capture that in a guide.
Something liberating. Something dynamic and not transactional. Something for most, not few.
Something useful and authentic for those aspiring for intergenerational leadership, beyond afterthoughts, tokenism, disastrous best-faith attempts, avoidance, scepticism, or performance. As one of the longest-standing, intergenerational movements, YWCA knows the imperative of adaptation and evolution to realize justice for all. YWCA has done our work through conflict, peace, crisis, and resolution.
This tool, The Intergenerational Triangle, is both a reflection of the YWCA movement’s history and a bold offering to the future. It was shaped through global conversations with hundreds of feminist leaders, co-designers, and community voices, including questions, hopes, tensions, and truths. This resource is for leaders in the non profit, for profit, public, private, UN member states, faith, philanthropic, recreational, academic, government and other sectors committed to the wisdom of
intergenerational leadership.
It draws from different settings, cultures, communities, and realities, and the parallel shared expertise, histories, and years of practice nurturing inclusive leadership across generations.
The development and implementation of tools which facilitate the practice of intergenerational leadership (IGL) is a key priority for the World Young Women’s Christian Association’s (World YWCA) strategic priority for the years 2020-2023 and 2024-2027. In this background, World YWCA has partnered with One Future Collective to design an evidence-based tool to encourage and support civil society organisations to practise intergenerational leadership in their contexts. A key exploration as a part of this partnership has been to build a tool which captures ways and methods by which IGL can be embedded into the organisations’ ethos and the personal practice of leaders within the civil society ecosystem around the world.
The process of developing this tool began with an extensive literature review followed by a landscape analysis of existing models of intergenerational leadership. To ensure that the tool we developed responded particularly to the needs and experiences of leaders within global feminist civil society, the second phase of developing this tool involved primary stakeholder consultation using the World YWCA Feminist Consultation Methodology. Through this process, we engaged various stakeholders via different formats, such as interviews, focus group discussions and surveys to gather information on different facets of IGL. Once the first iteration of the tool was developed, we wanted to test the tool for its applicability and usage. We adopted a multi-step process, including a survey-based review of the tool and research report with civil society
leaders and organisations. In addition to this, we also conducted micro tests of different segments of the tool with different organisations to assess its real time application. This tool is a culmination of these processes and hopes to set in motion a collective and transformative journey for the feminist civil society ecosystem towards the adoption and practice of intergenerational leadership. The tool brings to life two structural frames for the learning and growth around intergenerational leadership – a triangle approach that helps intersect guiding principles, building blocks and archetypes; and a self-audit tool helps assess where we are at with our IGL Journeys and how we can make progress.
We are always eager to support organisations along their journey towards practising intergenerational leadership. If you would like to know more about this tool or would like to provide feedback, please reach out to us at worldoffice@worldywca.org.