The NAN Decade Office has developed a Youth Councils Toolkit. It is designed to help you establish a community youth council. The samples and templates are for instructional purposes and you are encouraged to develop your own documents to suite your needs. Please feel free to use these materials to organize your youth council. Youth, as well as youth workers, Band employees, teachers, recreation workers, and other adults who are working with youth, should use these resources. Good luck as you develop your community youth council (YC).

The toolkit can be accessed here in PDF format. If you would like a hard copy of the toolkit or you would like us to send you a copy on floppy disk please contact Melanie Goodchild, Decade Coordinator with your request at

Table of Contents to see a list of the toolkit contents

Instructions for using the toolkit are found in the Welcome section

An Introduction to Youth Councils covers; what is a youth council? what does a youth council do? and benefits of joing a youth council

Steps to organizing a youth council gives you a ten step process for organizing your council

The Youth Council template is a template for drafting your youth council bylaws or terms of reference

One of the most important aspects of success is the ability to define and achieve goals. Learn more about the benefits of goal-setting; defining goals; summary of goal-setting; and establishing priorities

You may need or want to obtain a Band Council Resolution (BCR) supporting the establishment of your youth council, here is a template

Members of your youth council may want to sign a Code of Conduct and Officer Contract to ensure that they will take responsibility to run the affairs of the council in an appropriate way

Here are some sample bylaws as drafted by the NAN Decade Youth Council, who have since amended their bylaws as you will also do from time to time

Finally, once you have established your community/school/independent youth council you will have to hold meetings - here are some tips on running a good meeting