Hi, I’m Ulrike Nischan from the evaluation and research team at the national nonprofit organization Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund (CFE Fund). I’m excited to share how we recently helped local governments engage youth and community expertise in program design.
At the CFE Fund, we provide funding and technical assistance to more than 140 municipalities, supporting them in offering financial empowerment programs to residents. Over 30 local governments are successfully replicating our model of professional, one-on-one financial counseling as a free public service for adults, and we have helped close to 40 localities integrate financial empowerment supports like banking access into their summer youth employment programs. When we decided to explore financial counseling for youth aged 14 to 24—a critical time in a young person’s life recently termed “the decisive decade”—we saw an opportunity to try something new.
While many of our projects incorporate participant focus groups and interviews, we had limited experience with design research methods that deeply engage with lived experience. To chart the best path forward, we explored different design research methodologies, such as participatory research, co-design, participatory design, and co-creation. We also consulted with several experienced firms to gain insights before pitching the idea of incorporating design research techniques internally.
Rad Resource:
Our colleagues approached these methods with both excitement and caution, eager to develop a relevant, equitable, and sustainable youth-centered program while preserving the core elements that made our previous projects successful. With this in mind, we decided that a participatory research approach would best suit our needs—allowing us to incorporate youth expertise in the early stages of program development within our comfort level, budget, and timeline constraints.
Through competitive processes, we selected a consultant and three municipalities to join us on a journey of learning from youth and youth-serving organizations. We worked with a mayor’s education and youth engagement office, a consumer protection department and a county commission on human relations. They brought in local non-profit partners ranging from the United Way to organizations specializing in workforce development, interfaith organizing, public education, non-traditional post-secondary education, and of course financial empowerment. We were deeply encouraged by the enthusiasm our partners brought to participatory research.
Each municipal partner formed an advisory committee to provide input on the research and assist in recruiting participants for interviews and participatory research events. Together, we organized three day-long research sessions–one in each city–where youth and young adults engaged in a variety of facilitated group activities. More than 120 individuals shared their goals, concerns, questions, and ideas.
Through these engagements, we collected valuable insights into the financial needs of young people. Like adults, young people are most interested in financial counseling that is connected to actionable decision points. We also learned about youth preferences regarding counselor training, service locations, delivery formats, timing, and more. We’ll take their design suggestions seriously as we continue to build program ideas that local governments can try.
This experience provided us with a deep understanding of how youth want to receive guidance related to their financial lives. It also gave us more confidence in using participatory methods to enhance future research, evaluation, and program design efforts with our local government partners.
Lessons Learned:
- There are levels of participatory engagement; it’s important to pick the level that aligns with all partners’ comfort level and operational constraints.
- Just like evaluators, local government program directors are eager to learn from and empower the people they serve.
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