Engaging Opportunity Youth as Leaders

Engaging opportunity youth and former opportunity youth as leaders in research and programming provides many benefits. First, this type of engagement can connect opportunity youth with more experience in developing their leadership skills, while also making positive connections with adults. Second, involving opportunity youth as leaders can help inform development and implementation, further enhancing the effectiveness of research and programming aimed at helping opportunity youth.¹

Another approach is to engage former opportunity youth as mentors. Their personal experiences with disconnection to school and work gives them a unique and practical perspective that could greatly help youth who are at-risk for becoming disconnected.

Here are a few strategies on how to engage and support opportunity youth as leaders:

• Regularly collaborating with opportunity youth and acknowledging their input to inform agendas, strategies, and implementation for research and programming.²
• Giving opportunity youth formal roles and responsibilities in workgroups, youth advisory boards, and data collection.³
• Training opportunity youth in research and data collection,⁴ and other trainings that can be useful in real-world settings.
• Interviewing opportunity youth to gain insight from their perspective.⁵
• Fairly compensating opportunity youth for their work and time.⁶
• Providing opportunity youth with “human and financial resources, and training on how to make meaningful contributions”⁷ as the most successful initiatives involving opportunity youth have done.

References

¹ Mendelson, Mmari, Blum, Catalano, & Brindis, 2018
² Towns, 2019
³ Towns, 2019
⁴ American Institutes for Research, 2019
⁵ Mendelson, Mmari, Blum, Catalano, & Brindis, 2018
⁶ American Institutes for Research, 2019
⁷ Patton, Sawyer, Santelli, Ross, Afifi, Allen,…Viner, 2016