How Ready is Your Organization to Build and Sustain Youth-Adult Partnership? Use my new Initial Self-Evaluation and Organizational Audit to find out.

I’ve experienced on many occasions that the most impactful part of supporting a systems change process was when I asked new questions of an organization and facilitated dedicated discussions when everyone answered those questions. All of our organizations are moving all day, every day toward our goals, focused on doing all the things that make the organization a success. It’s incredibly challenging in the midst of that rush to lead deep systems change for ourselves, and deep systems change is exactly what’s required to embed authentic youth-adult partnership into your organization’s governance and operations. 

My Organizational Audit of Readiness to Build and Sustain Youth-Adult Partnership will ask your organization new questions about its connections to young people impacted by your decisions, will reveal alignment between your talk and your walk, and will recommend immediate actions to build on your strengths and turn around weaknesses.

Early Self-Evaluation

I recommend every organization, even ones not interested in a full audit, conduct a self-evaluation of readiness and interest in youth-adult partnership. Is your organization at the starting line of youth-adult partnership? Are you just getting started on a Couch to 5K? Or are you ready to run the marathon of systems change? This self-evaluation forms the first step of the audit process. 

What does an Organizational Audit include?

When you commit to an audit, your organization and I will partner on several steps following the self-evaluation. 

First, we will conduct listening sessions with your organization’s staff and leadership, the governing body if you have one (i.e. a Board of Directors), community or system partners, and youth impacted by your organization’s decisions. We will combine what we hear from all of these stakeholders to form a 360 degree view of your organization’s current readiness to embark on youth-adult partnership.

Second, we will interview a few key members of each stakeholder group. Our goal for these interviews will be additional clarity and a deeper understanding of what we learned in the surveys and listening sessions.  

Third, we will review your organization’s governing and operations documents. These documents reflect both your organization’s origin story and how you carry out your day-to-day work. Do the documents you use every day support your goals? Do they build mutual respect and trust among stakeholders?

I will then provide a written audit report to you, which will outline how ready your organization truly is to embark on youth-adult partnership and how to build on what you have, provide helpful comparisons to peer organizations, and recommend next steps. And we will work together to share the report with everyone who contributed to our learning and with the public. This sharing step is crucial to all future work since it creates accountability within and outside the organization.

I welcome introductory conversations with any organization considering an audit, and I’m happy to review and provide feedback on results of self-evaluations even if you are not considering a full audit. Let’s talk about it!

Practical Tips for Engaging Youth as Speakers at Your Event

Updated September 22, 2022

As a professional in youth development and justice, I’ve attended many conferences, meetings, and trainings where young people speak. Sometimes, how adults involve youth is downright cringe-worthy. Other times, it puts the young person in danger. 

I know that most, if not all, of the adults who seek to engage youth as speakers do so with good intent. But good intentions are not enough. Even when youth are not equipped to advocate for themselves in these situations, as they sometimes aren’t, adults bear responsibility to practice these basics.

Here are my practical steps adults should take to do more than “check the box” of youth voice and make it a safe, meaningful experience for adult and youth participants.

101-level best practices

• Avoid asking youth with juvenile records to share their charges or specifics of their offenses in public settings. 

You risk negating the protections of confidentiality central to juvenile records. 

• Value the experience of the young person AND what their experience taught them about policy or practice decisions. 

Youth are experts in their lives with the capacity to apply that expertise to systems change. You would never restrict a PhD to sharing their dissertation research, so why would you keep a young person from applying what they learned to your questions?

• Don’t “put youth on the spot” with questions you haven’t vetted with them beforehand. 

The spotlight may pressure youth to answer these questions even if they wouldn’t otherwise.

• Recognize the traumatic nature of what you’re asking youth to share. 

Ensure youth receive support from you, other trusted adults, and/or peers with more public speaking experience to avoid re-traumatization. Depending on the nature of the event, consider planning a safe word youth can use to privately signal discomfort. 

201-level best practices

• Partner with youth throughout the process, from planning the iniital proposal or agenda through debriefing after the event. 

A co-designed workshop will better accomplish your goals for and will avoid tokenizing young people. A token panelist is readily apparent to your audience. 

• Feature youth as a majority of the panel rather than have one youth represent all youth voices.

The experiences of young people, while they may share commonalities, are as unique as each person. Limiting your youth panelists to one risks leaving out crucial diversity of experience and, again, tokenizing an individual youth speaker. 

• Prioritize youth speakers at multiple points in an event, not just during the meal break. 

I’ve been to so many events where youth are relegated to talking over clinking forks and knives. Not only will your attendees appreciate having a moment to break bread with colleagues without interruption, you signal equal value of youth voice by giving youth equal representation in main event sessions.

301-level best practices

• Support youth to step into moderator or leadership roles. 

Youth who have served on panels or spoken at events before may be ready to step into moderator roles or manage a panel themselves. One goal of engaging youth in events can and should be to facilitate their professional development in diverse and evolving ways. 

To delve deeper on these tips or for direct support engaging youth in your organization’s upcoming events, contact me.

Inclusion Decision Tree: Intro Animation!

My Inclusion Decision Tree is a simple tool to guide your plan for community engagement. A new animation introduces the five questions in the tree. These five questions can help maximize your chance to make the best decision possible by doing the best community engagement possible.

For help using the Tree or more in depth strategic planning around community engagement, reach out to me.

I was excited to work with an awesome animator in New York to create the animation. His contact available on request.

Inclusion Decision Tree

This video walks you through a simple tool to help determine if your organization includes affected people in its decisions. While I mostly use policy-making for examples here, the Inclusion Decision Tree is useful in diverse situations by any organization hoping to make more effective decisions.

I was honored to originally record this for the Pretrial Justice Institute’s Pi-Con.