Fostering Youth Wellbeing: Exploring the Role of Authentic Youth-Adult Partnerships in Work Settings
Youth-Adult Partnership Blog Series ‘23
Many organizations offer employment opportunities to youth with a goal of advancing their knowledge and professional experience. However, in practice, often youth feel they aren’t gaining as much as they would have hoped as their responsibilities are few and limited. In this blog crafted by Cecily Mitchell-Harper, the Director of Knowledge & Learning at Student Success Network, we explore leveraging youth-adult partnership in the workplace to not only support the professional goals of youth, but their wellbeing too. Our Commitment to Wellbeing
As we near the end of 2023, it is an apt time to take a pause and reflect on where we at Student Success Network have been and where we are going. While this year has seen evolution in our work and our approach as we recentered collective impact and continuous improvement, one thing that has remained constant is our commitment to supporting the wellbeing of youth within our Network and beyond. As we consider the ways we’ve evolved to continuously be responsive to the needs of our Network, we wanted to share a little bit about how our understanding and approach to supporting youth wellbeing has also evolved.
In the fall of 2022, we launched the Creating Healing Centered Communities (CHCC) 2.0 Initiative. Deeply rooted in our commitment to support youth and staff wellbeing, CHCC 2.0 was created to address systemic inequities and challenge oppressive institutional norms and white supremacy culture, pervasive within the youth-development sector, that directly threaten wellbeing. CHCC 2.0 emerged from two earlier initiatives, Creating Healing Centered Communities and Cultivating Resilience. Rooted in the belief that solutions come from those closest to the challenge, CHCC 2.0 sought to directly involve youth and practitioners to shape healing-centered approaches and ultimately transform youth programs.
A significant difference between CHCC 2.0 and our previous initiatives is a more explicit focus on centering the voices and perspectives of youth within our Network. As we shared in our previous blog, YPAR Gems, during our YPAR project, we gained key insights as to how to best form equitable and authentic partnerships with young people to advance our mission. CHCC 2.0 was an apt space to directly apply some of these key learnings. Additionally, as CHCC 2.0 was focused on disrupting white supremacy culture and cultivating youth and staff wellbeing across our Network, we strived to ensure that our values and practices also embodied this approach.
Challenging the Norm
From the outset, we wanted young people to be directly involved in the design and implementation of the initiative. As we learned from YPAR, as an intermediary organization, direct youth programming is not the lane where we can have the greatest impact. Instead, we can have an even greater impact through intentionally integrating the voices and perspectives of youth into our existing work. To that end, we hired two former YPAR Youth Researchers, Kellen Zeng and Isanere Nunez, to serve as Research Coordinators on the CHCC team. Kellen and Isanere, both current college students from NYC, were integral team members who played a critical role in advancing the work of CHCC. We aimed to provide Kellen and Isanere with a different experience than what they would typically encounter as youth workers in an institutional setting and to engage with them in a different way, reflective of our values of equity, inclusivity and authentic youth-adult partnership.
Traditionally, within institutional spaces, youth workers are often viewed and positioned as nothing more than there to perform the administrative tasks that more senior staff don’t want to or don’t have time to do. Their voices too often are either dismissed or tokenized when what they have to say conveniently supports and advances the agenda of senior staff. Furthermore, they typically do not have a decision-making role of any significance within the organization. The overall assumption is that because they are young and relatively inexperienced, their insights can be taken with a grain of salt, and they are primarily there to learn from more seasoned adult staff. These dynamics and norms are reflective of adultism that is pervasive within institutional spaces and serve to reinforce systemic inequities and oppressive power structures that too often threaten the wellbeing of young people, particularly those most marginalized within society.
Kellen and Isanere’s presence on the CHCC team was an opportunity to intentionally challenge and disrupt these dynamics and norms. Through their involvement in the initiative, we reimagined what it means to have young people on staff, moving away from tokenizing/transactional relationships between youth and adults towards authentic/transformational relationships. This required us to unlearn adultism and challenge assumptions about their needs and the value that they bring to the space. While Kellen and Isanere learned core skills through their involvement, we intentionally created space for them to tap into their expertise and teach us. Through this, we redefined what we consider to be valuable knowledge within institutional spaces.
Pictured Kellen + Isanere with SSN CHCC team members at June ‘23 10-Year Anniversary Community of Practice. From left: Nora Corrigan, Kellen Zeng, Isanere Nunez, Omar Khan
Youth-Adult Partnership at Work
Typically, valuable knowledge is deemed as that which comes from formal education and direct work experience. Within authentic youth-adult partnerships, the lived experience of youth is positioned as a valuable form of knowledge that plays a significant role in moving the work forward. Kellen’s and Isanere’s work scopes were intentionally designed to reflect this.
For example, a critical work phase within the CHCC initiative was Listening Tours conducted with youth and staff from across member organizations to better understand challenges and bright spots related to wellbeing. Given their positionality, Kellen and Isanere led the youth Listening Tours, directly interviewing young people and analyzing the interviews to surface critical themes. Additionally, they were co-facilitators for our March 2023 Community of Practice session (pictured with the larger SSN team following the event on left), Culturally Responsive Practices to Support Youth Wellbeing, in which their direct lived experience and first-hand knowledge served as the key lever for member learning and application.
Furthermore, one of their major deliverables was Mind, Body, Scroll, a wellness resource guide created specifically for youth. Kellen and Isanere were best positioned to create this guide as it’s rooted in their lived experience and vantage point as NYC youth. In addition to their assignments, to create a more equitable and inclusive space, and to support Kellen and Isanere’s wellbeing, we had dedicated check-ins, developed equitable team practices and processes, and ensured that they had a key role in decision-making.
As we are committed to continuous improvement, we engaged in intentional step-back reflections to ensure that we were continuing to be in partnership with Kellen and Isanere in an authentic way. While we made some missteps and mistakes along the way, overall their reflections suggest that they did have a different experience — one that represents authentic youth-adult partnership that is supportive of their wellbeing. The following quotes from Kellen and Isanere as they reflected on their CHCC experience highlight this best:
“This experience has been transformative, showcasing that a true youth-adult partnership involves not just token inclusion, but an authentic integration of perspectives, responsibilities, and trust.”
“At CHCC, my contributions were sought after, my opinions held weight, and my feedback and suggestions were genuinely valued and considered. This environment is a stark contrast to traditional [Youth-Adult Partnerships], where youth voices are largely just tokenized.”
“Something I’ve always appreciated in this partnership is feeling a sense of belonging, my input is valuable and is requested in each space I attend…Mentorship is present, but it’s a mutual exchange – we learn just as much from one another. This bi-directional exchange contributes to a shared pool of learning. ”
“…The CHCC experience, deeply reshaped my perception of youth-adult partnerships on various levels. It illuminated the fundamental principle of equality that these partnerships are meant to uphold.”
We are so grateful for the partnership we were able to share with Kellen and Isanere over the 2022-23 academic year. In this time, they truly became integrated into our larger team. If you missed it earlier, check out their final project website: Mind, Body Scroll. Please visit and share this resource guide with NYC youth, and feel free to also submit additional resources using this form.
