Hello! My name is Heather Worker, and I am the Program Data Manager for a Food for Thought in northern California. My former evaluation roles advanced outcomes for youth and young adults, where evaluation and program design activities involved youth voice to varying degrees.
Lessons Learned
- To build trust with youth, present yourself authentically. I felt so nervous interviewing young adults in a transitional housing program about their housing experience when I landed my first job fresh out of graduate school; how was I going to establish rapport and credibility with young people who had such different life experiences from my own? It was only when I started to show up a bit more like my real self (read: wearing jeans in lieu of business casual) that youth participants in turn felt comfortable sharing more honestly with me.
- Be ready to “make visible” how young people’s concerns, questions, and ideas are relevant for evaluation and program design. Young people may not come to the table immediately ready to “develop evaluation questions” or “make meaning of data” in the same ways that adults have been socialized to do, but that does not mean their contributions are irrelevant or unusable. As an evaluator, you are well positioned to translate youth voice into different aspects of the evaluation process by paraphrasing or clarifying youth input and then thinking out loud as you model how and where their contribution can fit in with the broader evaluation plan.
- Be realistic about you/your organization’s capacity to engage youth in evaluation. A single evaluator may not have the bandwidth to take on a long term evaluation project involving deep participation with youth––and that is okay! Limiting the number of youth participants involved or determining that only one part of the evaluation will involve youth partners is a fantastic way to involve youth more deeply in evaluation or try out a more participatory evaluation approach for the first time.
- Recognize youth feedback–even when it can’t be acted on. At a meeting, a young adult on the team had shared their frustration about providing some feedback to program leadership but never having their concerns addressed. This young person knew their concern would not be resolved in the way they had hoped-they merely wanted to be heard! Our evaluation department validated this person’s frustration, made sure they received a response, and then spoke with program leadership to ensure that youth feedback was reviewed systematically moving forward. Young people understand that their feedback will not always be implemented, but they deserve acknowledgement and a closing-of-the-loop regardless.
Rad Resources
- The Annie E. Casey Foundation has actionable guidelines on how to partner with young people.
- UC Berkeley’s YPAR Hub just launched a best practice guide to doing youth participatory action research, full of developmental considerations for partnering with youth and tips for structuring evaluation projects with youth.
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