Officers

This traditional leadership model positions youth in formal officer roles, including a president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer.

Strengths of this model:

• It's used in many other settings, including 4-H clubs, so it is familiar to most youth.

• Each of the roles has a defined set of guidelines and expectations.

• It creates aspirational roles for youth.

Shared Leadership

In a shared leadership model, leadership of meetings and activities rotates to each interested member.

Strengths of this model:

• It gives each interested member an opportunity to lead without requiring an extended commitment to serve in a single leadership role.

• It allows for flexibility in groups with inconsistent attendance.

• It eliminates competitive aspect of position-seeking.

Core Leadership Team

In this model, the more senior members of the group take on collective leadership roles as part of their membership and serve as mentors to newer members.

Strengths of this model:

• It is a team approach to leadership that positions more experienced youth to exercise their leadership.

• Shared responsibilities among the leadership group make it a reasonable time commitment

• It provides many youth the opportunity to serve in a key leadership position

• It allows for a junior leadership team (or ambassador-in-training-like) program to surface

Committees

Activities are categorized into themes and are assigned to various committees, and youth leaders are assigned as chairs of committees. 

Strengths of this model:

• It provides an opportunity for youth to lead a smaller group toward a shared goal

• It creates an executive board of committee chairs to connect program elements

• Committees can be event-specific (County Fair, Project workshop, etc) or be theme-based (service, outreach, social/belonging, etc)