To be reverent is to worship or honor something as sacred. Irreverence is something we typically consider to be bad. It insinuates a naïveté and rebelliousness. But I’d like to suggest that a little bit of irreverence might just be what we need right now to transform the system. So the ambition of Re:Structure is to create structural change in municipal services to prevent youth marginalization. When we talk about structures, we are talking about the invisible “rules of the game” that determine how things work. For example, there is a general rule that you are supposed to raise your hand before you speak in the classroom. Over the last six months, we’ve been working with eight different groups of youth in Asker, Bærum, and Trondheim to identify the rules of the game that are keeping some youth excluded. For instance, a group of trans and gender non-conforming youth up in Trondheim unpacked the rules connected to who can use which washroom and changing room. All of the youth groups have made installations about their experiences of rubbing up against different rules. As service providers, politicians, municipal leaders, and civil servants engage with the exhibition, they have been asked to identify the rules of the game that they, too, think need to change. When reflecting on the collages made by a group of five youth who haven’t been in school for the last three to four years, one service provider realized, “Oh, we have a rule that youth must articulate what they need in order to get help.” Starting to question and challenge these rules of the game is a form of irreverence. To be irreverent means recognizing that something might be a little too powerful. It means knowing the rules and resisting them based on a feeling that they are in conflict with a greater value. Only by getting to know these rules can we expose or subvert or change them. Through our Re:Act exhibition, we are getting these rules ready for revision. Irreverent people in the system are a threat to the system. Cultivating irreverence is a risk, of course, but so too is the status quo. But irreverence can be full of hope and humor. And being irreverant can be FUN (gasp!). It doesn't have to mean complete opposition to the system or taking action that irresponsibly dismantles the system. We can think thoughtfully about how this resistance moves us. Just as irreverence is integral to our coming of age in adolescence, I’d argue that it is also foundational to our municipal systems coming of age amid massive contextual shifts. *Thinking about the concept of irreverance has been inspired by reading Adam Philip’s book “The Life You Want” which explores how we experiment toward the lives we want and discover what they are.