The Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development

Communication based around a commitment to connecting young people with each other and with their communities underlies all areas of the Innovation Center's work. A belief in the necessity of incorporating the voices and wisdom of young people into all phases of local initiatives - from the research and development phase onward - reflects the Innovation Center's focus on fostering programmes that reflect and respond to young people's and communities' genuine needs and goals. Core components include:

• Youth Leadership - The IC brings and promotes a collaborative approach, as well as a focus on social justice, to youth leadership development. This approach is reflected in the various resources that the organisation has developed related to each of the 4 main leadership stages: Get Ready, Plan, Implement, and Sustain. These toolkits - available to anyone, free of charge, on the IC website - offer practical activities, tips, and handouts.
• Youth and Civic Engagement - IC consultants help communities engage youth, adults, and organisations to contribute to community development initiatives. This work centres around research, documentation, and youth development strategies.
• Youth-Adult Partnership - The IC is committed to the idea that authentic and successful youth engagement requires a shift in the mental models that both youth and adults have about each other. To this end, Innovation Center initiatives seek to stimulate learning about how youth-adult partnerships can be a vehicle for this shift in thinking and promote real social change.
• Youth Development - The IC approaches youth development with a commitment to social justice, relationship building, and practical resources and training.
• Programme Evaluation - The IC brings together practical tools for evaluating youth development outcomes, focusing on seeking out, testing, and promoting innovative methods for involving youth and community members in programme evaluation processes.
• Organisational Development - The IC builds the capacity of organisations and their staff through training, technical assistance, networking, convening, and education. These processes focus on helping groups articulate guiding principles, implement strategic plans, manage staff transitions, and evaluate performance.
• Community Building - The IC partners with organisations to support community leaders and youth workers in all variations of community building - from work in inner cities to rural development and sustainability efforts.
• Consulting Services - The IC offers consulting services that help foundations, organisations, and community groups design and launch new initiatives, manage implementation, and evaluate impact.

Examples reflecting the above strategies (for many others, visit the IC website):

• The IC worked with 12 local activist organisations to study how young people benefit from becoming activists. This research revealed that young people involved in social change organisations built strong relationships with adults, learned how to be leaders, and became more involved in their communities. This process informed IC's development of training programmes and print materials to help organisations, funders, and researchers incorporate these findings into their own work.
• The IC worked to guide the Kellogg Foundation's Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC), an effort that draws together teams of young people and adults to address key issues in their communities such as immigration, dropout prevention, youth voice, community safety, and school-community relations. The IC helped Kellogg design the initiative goals and strategies, recruit and pick community partners, provide training and technical assistance to sites, and conduct national peer gatherings of community members. The IC is also documenting the best practices and lessons learned from sites and disseminating them to key audiences. A new toolkit and video documentary bring the lessons to life and offer practical tips for replication. An online "knowledge well" where grassroots and national leaders can find and share tools, activities, stories, and ideas, has been created as a resource for the entire field. The Knowledge Well also contains the Online Communities section - a network of human resources. The Innovate blog features youth and community development news, and one may also communicate with other users in discussion forums about youth engagement topics, as well as share ideas, insights, and best practices, using document libraries.
• The IC worked with the Time Warner Foundation to create a youth advisory board. The effort began with the IC talking with staff to help them figure out how to involve young people in serious strategic planning. Then they formed an advisory board of 10 young people who were "regular kids...[who] weren't afraid to ask the tough questions....Time Warner staff members were amazed at how well these young people understood the foundation's work and could guide its efforts."
• The IC worked with a frontier community in Nebraska where small farmers were losing their farms to corporate ranchers and parents were losing their kids to out-of-state jobs. The IC led them through the "Building Community" process, which involved citizens identifying their community's strengths and developing a community vision. One thing they decided they desperately needed was training in technology in order to stay up-to-date on cattle prices, connect with other communities, and help local businesses stay current. The IC helped them get that training.

Civic Engagement, Youth.

The following example of an IC effort illustrates some qualitative impact data: Working with youth trainers, one IC trainer trains communities to use the IC's Building Community toolkit to engage youth and adults. With his help, in St. Francois County in Farmington, Missouri, a team of youth and adults created a countywide youth/adult council with 16 seats out of 32 held by youth. Steve notes that "The goal of the council is to expand the role of young people in local organizations and demonstrate what can be accomplished through youth/adult partnerships." The council has formed work groups and is now planning projects. Under Steve's leadership, youth and adults throughout Missouri are using the toolkit to support efforts to develop youth centres. Steve says, "The tool kits help surface assets and strengths that young people bring to the community." A state youth civic leaders' summit brought together 100 youth leaders and adult facilitators to celebrate accomplishments and create local action plans for engaging more youth and adults. "We're seeing a national movement to get youth involved in decision-making and governance, with more funding and more incentives to make it happen," says Steve.