Grantmakers for Thriving Youth hosted a webinar, featuring a dynamic discussion on the critical importance of directly engaging youth in the R&D process. The session emphasized the need to shift our perspective of young people from "problems to be solved" to active "agents of solutions." The presentation included a practical demonstration of a youth engagement session, highlighting the value of open-ended questions, empathetic listening, and focusing on the individual's experience. Overall, the webinar showcased the transformative potential of genuine youth engagement, unlocking more relevant, responsive, and effective solutions.
Presenters:
- David Hersh (In Tandem CEO): With extensive experience in various fields, David highlighted the universal importance of engaging individuals directly in problem-solving.
- Natalie Mitchell-Bay (Hewlett Foundation Program Officer): Natalie's background in education, particularly in areas where community and student voice are critical, informed her perspective on youth engagement.
- Trinity (In Tandem Youth Partner): Trinity offered valuable insights as a young person actively participating in youth engagement activities.
- Asha Canady (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Senior Program Officer): Asha's experience as an educator and instructional leader provided a practical lens to the conversation.
Key Takeaways:
- Youth as Experts: Young people are experts in their own experiences. We should engage them in ways that allow us to leverage that expertise. Solutions anchored in users' experiences are more likely to be impactful.
- Iterative R&D: Youth-engaged R&D is an iterative process where individual insights at each state of the R&D process generate hypotheses that get tested at later stages of the R&D process.
- Prioritize Understanding: While understanding youth experiences is a priority at all stages of the R&D process, it’s especially critical at the earliest stages. Ideally, we should aim to understand young people’s experience of something before defining the problem to be solved. At the least, we should understand it before developing a solution.
- Remove Friction: The key to increasing youth engagement is eliminating the logistical and procedural barriers that often prevent organizations from engaging them.
- Democratization of Youth Engagement: If the goal is to engage youth in everything that affects them, we need to ensure that it doesn't require expertise that few possess.
You shouldn't need to be a user-centered design expert to conduct effective youth engagement sessions. Natalie and Asha modeled with Trinity what this can look like. This is much easier when we orient ourselves toward young people as experts in their experience. All we need to do is create conditions enabling them to share their experience authentically.
In Tandem's Role:
In Tandem plays a crucial role in facilitating authentic and impactful youth engagement.
- We handle logistics like parental consent and compensation, allowing organizations to focus on the conversation itself.
- We provide guidance to help organizations design effective engagement sessions tailored to their specific needs.
Audience Questions/Discussion:
- Benefits of Engagement: Many participants expressed a desire to increase youth engagement, recognizing the potential for increased innovation, inclusivity, and positive outcomes.
- "In a dream world, our work to support school systems in making the shifts needed to be learner-centered would include a lot of time with the learners to better understand their needs and desires and co-create with them."
- In Tandem has a project exploring exactly this.
- Importance of Authenticity: The chat highlighted the importance of genuinely engaging youth in decision-making and design processes. Authenticity is critical.
- "What if we elicit feedback but we can't act on it due to various constraints?"
- "How do you do that without coming across fake? Youth can sense that…and it's not a good look."
- The comments highlighted the need for clear expectation setting and orienting all parties to the role young people are playing in a given session. We need to ensure we do what we promise to.
- Youth as Experts: Participants recognized that young people are experts in their own experiences and should be treated as such.
- Challenges to Engagement: Barriers such as funding, staff capacity, competing needs, scheduling, and legal processes were identified as hindering youth engagement. These are the frictions In Tandem is designed to address.
- "How do we compensate young people for their expertise?" In Tandem handles this because they believe it’s critical and have learned that it's a challenge for most organizations.
- Methods of Engagement: The audience identified open-ended questions, empathetic listening, and focusing on individual experiences as strategies for youth engagement.
Further Discussion:
Reach out to Dave at dhersh@in-tandem.org and/or follow In Tandem on LinkedIn.
About In Tandem
In Tandem is dedicated to elevating youth voices and fostering authentic engagement to create impactful, user-centered solutions. By integrating the unique perspectives of young people into the design process, In Tandem helps organizations develop programs and products that resonate deeply with their target audience. In Tandem streamlines the logistics of youth engagement, ensuring a safe and effective experience for all participants. Learn more at in-tandem.org.
Media Contact:
David Torres
Chief Growth Officer
dtorres@in-tandem.org