Raising Young Voices: CLTI-KC
When parents begin PLTI-KC, they spend months discovering something powerful: their experiences matter, their voices belong in the rooms where decisions are made, and they have the ability to create change.
For some PLTI-KC families, something equally important is happening just down the hall.
The Children’s Leadership Training Institute (CLTI) brings PLTI-KC’s commitment to leadership into the next generation. While parents develop their own civic leadership skills, children have a space to begin discovering their voices, exploring their communities and recognizing that they, too, can help shape the world around them.
And this year, the people guiding that experience know firsthand what PLTI-KC can make possible. CLTI Co-Teachers Amanda Walker-Jackson and Janita Webb are both PLTI-KC parent leaders.
Their journey from parent leaders to educators of the next generation captures something fundamental about the PLTI-KC community: leadership grows when people have opportunities not only to develop their own voices, but to help someone else discover theirs.
For Amanda, the connection between PLTI and CLTI is straightforward.
“Just like we’re elevating parents’ voices, we’re elevating children’s voices.”
Amanda sees CLTI as an opportunity to make sure children—particularly children whose voices and experiences may too often be overlooked—begin learning early that what they think and experience matters.
That doesn’t mean telling children what to think. It means giving them tools to ask questions, understand the world around them and recognize their own capacity to participate in it.
Amanda is an educator at Crossroads Academy–Quality Hill and a PLTI-KC Class of 2024 parent leader who also serves on PLTI-KC's advisory board. Her experience extends beyond her own classroom: she has facilitated learning for fellow educators around using storytelling to create culturally responsive, empowering learning environments and has shared her expertise with Kansas City families about practical ways parents can support children's literacy and learning at home.
Amanda describes one of her gifts as helping children believe in themselves, even when the messages they receive elsewhere might tell them otherwise. For her, that confidence is foundational to CLTI: children are gaining tools to understand issues, navigate systems and begin seeing themselves as people capable of creating change. And even in the first weeks of class, she is already seeing the individuality of this year’s group emerge.
Amanda describes a classroom as a “salad bowl,” each child bringing something distinctive that makes the whole group richer. Now, she gets to watch what happens as those individual personalities begin learning and leading together.
Janita brings another powerful perspective to the CLTI classroom.
An experienced educator, instructional coach and administrator, Janita believes children learn best when they have voice and choice in their own learning. Her background includes experience with project-based instruction and designing learning experiences that allow students to help drive the process rather than simply receive information.
That approach fits naturally with CLTI. Janita wants children to leave the experience with the capacity to “wonder about the world and to problem solve about the world.”
But before children can confidently tackle big questions, they need a place where it feels safe to have them. After the first CLTI class of the year, Janita noticed that some children arrived shy and hesitant. She also watched them begin opening up as relationships formed and they realized there wasn’t a “wrong answer.”
For Janita, building that confidence is one of the things that makes teaching CLTI particularly meaningful. The message she wants them to understand is simple:
“It’s okay not to know something—and it’s okay to want to learn.”
There is something especially meaningful about Amanda and Janita leading CLTI as PLTI-KC alumnae themselves.
They once entered PLTI-KC as parent leaders developing their own skills, relationships and voices. Today, they’re creating the environment where children can begin doing the same.
That’s the promise of PLTI-KC’s two-generational approach. When we invest in parent leadership, the impact doesn’t end with one person. Parents bring what they learn home. They bring it into schools, workplaces, organizations and neighborhoods. They model leadership for their children. And, sometimes, they return to PLTI-KC to help develop the leaders coming behind them.
At the same time that Cohort 9 parents are asking questions about their communities and discovering new ways to use their voices, their children are learning that they don’t have to wait until adulthood to be curious, engaged or capable of making a difference.
Under Amanda and Janita’s leadership, CLTI is creating space for children to wonder, speak, listen, problem-solve and believe in what they can contribute.
Parent leaders developing child leaders. That’s what leadership across generations can look like.
