Creating Youth-Adult Partnerships: Training Curricula for Youth, Adults and Youth-Adult Teams

Created by the United States (US)-based Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, this resource leads youth and adults new to group facilitation and to youth-adult partnerships through a 6-8 hour training to build their capacity to work together in true collaboration.

It is based on the observation that "the philosophy of working to create equitable partnerships between youth and adults is consistent with the research on resiliency, adolescent development, and the literature formulating the youth development field." However, while there is increasing recognition of the capacity of young people to be involved in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of projects and programmes relevant to their needs and issues, "engaging young people as partners in program development often places adults in unfamiliar and even uncomfortable positions. The way we have interacted with young people over the course of our lifetimes established patterns of behavior that are extremely difficult to modify. As a result, many adults say or do things that make being a true partner with young people extremely difficult."

The step-by-step curriculum includes the scripts for 3 training workshops (a 2-hour youth piece, a 2-hour adult piece, and a 4-hour youth-adult team workshop), an explanation of the process that was used with both youth and adults to develop the materials, a list of possible outcomes people may want to achieve through youth-adult partnerships, an adult self-assessment tool, and a beginning resource list on the topic.