Working with Young People
This section helps us to think about the aspects of working with young people that will shape your youth program. The goal is to stretch, reorient, and grow how you might consider the following ideas:
What does youth mean? Who does it include?
What is safety? What creates a safe(r) environment for young people?
How will you practice recruitment, consent, and program evaluation?
We invite you to try on new words. These ideas are meant to strengthen relationships and develop more robust youth programs.
Before imagining how you will build a youth program, it’s important to think through your understanding of what “youth” means and who it includes. Youth is a term that has different interpretations. Mainstream conversations often use “youth” to refer to a developmental stage that is prior to adulthood, with varying ages to bracket this period of time (Furlong, 2012). However, considering “youth” as a stage before adulthood implies that young people are underdeveloped, which undermines their self-determination and decision-making abilities.
Instead, we think of “youth” as a structural location that is based on social position and histories. Youth is constructed differently across time, place, race, gender, class, and sexual categories. Many youth programs rely on a developmental approach, framing their projects as “developing” or “empowering” young people. We suggest building youth programs that are not seeking ways to develop young people, but rather to work with young peoples’ social locations, expertise, and desires for the future (Tuck and Yang, 2013).
Furlong, A. (2012). Youth studies: An introduction. Routledge.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (Eds.). (2013). Youth resistance research and theories of change. Routledge.
Guided Prompts & Activites
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Before imagining how you will build a youth program, it’s important to think through your understanding of what “youth” means and who it includes.
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Safety protocols are important components to build into any programming. Often, safety refers to available first-aid kits, emergency contacts, food allergy lists, etc. We invite you to consider a fuller definition of safety
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One of the most significant aspects of safety is consent. Aside from seeking consent at the beginning stages of a youth program - through permission slips and consent forms - how can you build a culture of consent into your program?
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Working with young people requires a continual balancing of collective and individual needs. Young people are diverse, with complex experiences and capacities which will impact the ways in which they access the programming offered. In order to best serve young people, we should prepare our programs with this diversity in mind to increase engagement and accessibility from the start rather than trying to adapt later on.
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While your program may not be designed to address mental health issues, working with youth requires us to be prepared to support them where they are.
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We might refer to the process of seeking youth participants to join a program as “recruitment”. However, recruitment signals particular kinds of relationships that are often hierarchical, eg. military recruitment.
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Some participants will move through a program from start to finish together. More often than not, however, participants might be leaving or joining a program at different points. Either way, it is important to plan for transitions and for how youth participants will enter and leave the program.
Suggested citation:
Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab. (2023). Working with Young People [Land Education Dreambook]. https://www.landeducationdreambook.com/working-with-young-people