It is important to practice youth-adult partnerships within your organization

This can mean engaging youth as collaborators in service planning and design, service provision, research, and/or community leadership and advocacy.

Check out the NN4YYouth Action Board Advocacy Toolkit and webinar on demand for what young leaders need to know about the policymaking process and effective advocacy strategies.

Engaging Youth in Service Planning and Design

Youth councils, youth advisory boards, and other groups of young people should have opportunities to participate in strategic planning and program design. Youth should be invited to join from the beginning and “think big” about the services provided by the organization.

Youth should also be asked to weigh in on specific decisions about programming. These decisions may seem less important to the organization but may be more important to the youth receiving services.

Services should be routinely evaluated via a continuous improvement process that includes youth feedback. For example, an organization might provide exit surveys to youth after services and/or periodically facilitate interviews or focus groups with a sample of past youth clients.

Engaging Youth in Service Provision

  • Some youth have strengths that position them as excellent supports for other youth clients in roles such as mentor, peer navigator, or peer support specialist. 
  • Youth may also help other youth clients locate services, complete applications to enroll in services, and more. 
  • Think about what paid roles you can create for youth with lived experience within your organization. Even roles such as cooking, cleaning, landscaping, and answering phones may interest some young people looking for work.
  • Youth who have completed services successfully can be excellent role models and motivators for youth who have less experience with your program.

Engaging Youth in Research

  • Participatory Action Research addresses challenges or inequities while studying them, typically by engaging those impacted by the issue being studied in study design and/or implementation. Researchers who study youth are increasingly practicing Youth Participatory Action Research.
  • There is evidence that engaging youth as peer researchers has benefits both for the engaged youth and for the research.
  • Even if your organization is not a formal research institution, it may be appropriate to engage youth in organizational evaluation activities, such as designing and implementing surveys, facilitating focus groups, analyzing data, and/or synthesizing findings. These activities may provide valuable information to guide organizational and community planning.

Engaging Youth in Community
Leadership and Advocacy

  • Community efforts to allocate and distribute funds and other resources should share power with youth who have relevant lived experience.
  • For example, local organizations engaged in planning to address homelessness should include youth who have lived experience with homelessness. Young people can participate by serving on advisory boards, helping with the annual Point-In-Time count and/or youth counts, reviewing and scoring funding applications, etc.
  • Youth should also be involved in efforts to lobby at the local, state, and national levels for funding and policies to support youth experiencing homelessness. They should be involved in planning discussions around what funding and policy changes are needed and advocating for those changes (including testifying at hearings, making lobbying visits, etc.) and policy implementation and evaluation.