Youth take the lead at the State of the Field Conference

At the 2019 State of the Field Conference on Youth Participation, YDI gave a master class in offering young people opportunities to lead and supporting them from behind. In a breakout workshop attended by dozens of youth practitioners from youth-serving organizations and agencies across the city, three young people facilitated a session on youth-adult partnership. Aailiah DeAbreu, Ebube Nwaeme, Ashanti Williams, all members of YDI’s My Brothers/Sisters Keeper Youth Council, demonstrated what preparedness looks like. Taking turns in leading the facilitation of the workshop, each young person brought a sense of confidence to their handling of the material and their interaction with workshop attendees. In a workshop opener called “Attitude Check”, Ebube led participants through an exercise designed to test their assumptions about what young people can do and when adults should support them. After leading the exercise and a debrief discussion, Ebube highlighted the importance of the two words “can” and “should” and how they reflect the distinction between what youth are capable of, and the support that adults step in with. Dennis Carter, YDI’s Director of Community Youth Development, then pointed out to the group how these attitudes were aligned with mindsets that adults working with youth have to cultivate about providing young people with opportunities to acquire, practice and utilize new skills. Aailiah then facilitated the group through an exercise to help participants identify skills they feel they’ve acquired and walk them through the processes by which they developed those skills, highlighting the critical role of opportunity in the discussion. Lastly, Ashanti introduced the idea of authentic participation: What it looks like for young people when opportunities and preparation come together. With Dennis and lead trainer Theo Phillips looking on, Ashanti enumerated all the opportunities that the Youth Council had been offered through their work with YDI to build the skills the young people demonstrated in leading the workshop.

Career Internship Network launches its 2019-2020 Program Year→

YDI’s Career Internship Network, (CIN) launched the year with its first meeting at the New York Historical Society, a CIN member organization. The launch set up the program year with a focus on assessment and evaluation. Starting the year off with assessment makes sense for CIN, since our members have learned from our network meetings and TA offerings that solid program planning and high-quality internship design always starts with the questions “What are you trying to accomplish? What do we want students to walk away with?” Framing program and curriculum design with these questions is a CIN best practice. The year promises to be a highly engaging one for CIN’s nearly 45 active members, who hail from cultural and educational institutions across the City from big players like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to smaller organizations with unique offerings like Hudson River Community Sailing. All serve high-school youth in high-quality, youth-development focused internships that are grounded in project-based learning.

This year’s programming includes workshops on Communication and Feedback from an Asset-Based Perspective, Stress and Trauma-informed Practice, and Engaging and Working with Alumni. CIN is a member-led, peer learning network that has contributed to high-quality internships across the New York City landscape for more than 15 years. For more info about CIN, check out our website.