In recent years, policy advocates and decision makers have increasingly turned to young people with lived experience navigating youth-serving systems (e.g., child welfare, employment) to inform policy. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation’s Foster Youth and Opportunity Youth Initiatives (“Initiatives”) have prioritized grantmaking to organizations that engage youth in their policy efforts. The Initiatives partnered with Child Trends to conduct a qualitative study profiling five grantee organizations that engage young people in policy efforts—Center for Fair Futures, Georgia EmpowerMEnt, Los Angeles Opportunity Youth Collaborative, Los Angeles Youth Development Department (in partnership with Para Los Niños), and New Orleans Youth Alliance.
Each of the five organizations identified a recent “policy win” in which they had engaged young people. Each organization also identified one youth and one adult representative to serve on the project’s Research Group, which met regularly to participate in the design of the study, data analysis, and dissemination of findings.
To explore the policy wins, Child Trends and the Research Group built on existing frameworks to refine the Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy Framework (Framework). By applying the Framework, we answer the following questions for each policy win in this series of profiles:
- How are youth involved?
- How did the organization empower and support youth?
- What local factors help or hinder youth engagement?
- What outcomes did youth achieve?
To learn more about the Framework and themes that emerged across the five policy wins, see the Framework. Individual profiles for each organization can be downloaded below.