In Tandem is reimagining what it means to engage young people by treating them as experts in their own experience. Founded in 2024, the company is building a marketplace that connects youth-facing organizations with young people to co-create programs, products, and policies. In this “5 Questions,” CEO David Hersh talks about why this work matters, what he’s learned so far, and where In Tandem is headed. At a time when youth agency is too often overlooked, In Tandem is making it easier for companies and institutions to listen to and collaborate with the next generation.
What is the nature of your work?
What would happen if young people had a voice in everything that affects them? How much more impactful would programs be? How much stronger would their sense of agency and self-efficacy become? We founded In Tandem to find out.
Our hypothesis is simple: if we make it safe and incredibly easy for adults and organizations to engage young people, they will. Over time, can engaging young people in the things that affect them become so ubiquitous that the next generation won’t remember a world without it?
To test this theory, we’re building a marketplace where youth-facing organizations can partner with young people to do everything from understanding their lived experiences to co-designing products and services. We remove the friction by handling what usually gets in the way: from recruiting and consent to the coordination of all activities and compensation through quarterly scholarships.
The beauty of this is that helping companies helps young people and vice versa. Our impact isn’t incidental to their collaboration—the impact they seek is our impact.
Why is this work important?
There is plenty of evidence that young people are struggling in myriad ways. At the same time, this moment has the makings of a critical inflection point: politics and technology are creating a rare mix of risk and opportunity. At the heart of both is something all people understand from experience: feeling seen and heard matters.
What if we treated young people as experts in the issues that affect them—could that lead to better outcomes for youth and for all of us? Authentically asking young people to participate in the things that affect them has already been shown to improve agency, self-efficacy, and belonging—things that their current experience often doesn’t provide.
But what else could improve? Imagine a world where young people are seen, heard, and valued not just for future contributions, but for what they can offer today. How much more engaging could school be? What would civic engagement look like if young people grew up expecting to have a say? How many more innovations might emerge if we unlock millions of the most open minds we have?
Our work matters because it helps us start to answer these questions.
What’s been the biggest surprise so far?
Our biggest surprise came before we even launched. In early spring 2024, we were running a prototype of what would become In Tandem, operating as a small project within a larger organization that was sunsetting. In conversations with our stakeholders, we learned two things: (1) they were counting on us to ensure they could engage young people safely and easily, and (2) no alternatives existed. That clarity ultimately drove the decision to launch In Tandem.
Since launching, the best surprises come from what we learn from Youth Partners. No matter how high our expectations get for what they are capable of, they never cease to impress us.
Where do you see your work in five years?
Our moonshot goal is simple: within a generation, young people will have a voice in everything that affects them. In other words, the next generation of young people will know that everything they experience has been influenced by young people.
We are currently building the foundation for that by focusing on a few high-impact markets, such as ed tech and digital health. Five years from now, we should be serving several more markets and continuing to expand. We should be self-sustaining through earned revenue by then, and I would expect to grow the cohort from around 200 young people to over 500.
In other words, our trajectory should have us squarely aimed at the moon.
What else should people know?
What we do and how we do it are based on the same foundational premise: we cannot be experts in someone else’s experience. Hopefully, how that informs what we do is obvious. We help organizations engage young people as experts in their experience because otherwise, organizations are guessing about something that’s critical to their impact. How it manifests itself in how we do the work might be less obvious. In the end we need to deliver impact to both young people and organizations. To do that well, we need to understand what problem they come to us to solve, the barriers they face in solving it, and the implications for them if they can. So we practice what we preach. Most of our energy goes to conducting ongoing, iterative, relational discovery with organizations and Youth Partners. What we learn from them drives everything we do.
