A Youth Advisory Committee, YAC, is a youth grantmaking body of a community foundation with a permanently endowed youth fund. YACs focus on serving the youth in their community by addressing issues of concern and importance to local youth through grantmaking from the revenue earned on the youth endowment.
YACs first got their start in the 1990’s with community foundations, when the W.K. Kellogg Foundation issued a youth challenge as part of the Michigan Community Foundations Youth Project (MCFYP).
Community foundations and affiliate funds received more than $47.6 million to create 86 permanently endowed youth funds, matched by more than $100 million raised locally for unrestricted and field of interest funds.
As a condition of the challenge, each of those funds is overseen by a Youth Advisory Committee (YAC), involving nearly 1,900 young people annually as YAC members who focus on fund development, youth empowerment, and grantmaking.
To learn more about how YACs started, the grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Michigan Community Foundations Youth Project see the resources below.
Why Youth? Why Community Foundations? - A speech by Dr. Russell Mawby, former Chairman of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, this resource outlines how the Michigan Community Foundations Youth Project began and provides context about the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s youth challenge grant.
Social Development Notes: Community Driven Development – A newsletter from the World Bank, this resource discusses how community foundations across the world are engaging youth to affect community growth and change.
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