When you think about engaging young people in the policy process, perhaps you imagine a day spent at the Capitol, where youth testify in front of a committee of lawmakers to educate them on the importance of a bill. While this may be an impactful type of youth engagement during the advocacy phase of the policy process, what happens after the bill passes? Who ensures that the policy’s implementation is faithful, working toward its intended impact and reaching youth?
Engaging youth in policy implementation can be part of the answer to both questions. Across two phases of the Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy project (see box), Child Trends learned that youth are least likely to be engaged in the policy implementation stage of the policy process. However, youth-adult partnership during implementation provides an opportunity for young people to bring their lived expertise to decisions about how policies are put into practice, helping improve processes, systems, and the degree to which policies effectively reach and support young people.
This blog shares important context about partnering with young people in policy implementation, based on recent Child Trends work; highlights learnings from organizations that regularly collaborate with youth in policy implementation; and shares ideas for organizations looking to engage youth in policy implementation.
To inform this blog, we invited three organizations supported by the Hilton Foundation to share how they engage youth and maintain momentum during the policy implementation phase, and to describe any challenges they faced and how they navigated them. These organizations have used a variety of approaches (e.g., convening a youth advisory board, partnering with a cohort of youth advocates) that have informed several key takeaways.
Co-designing with youth is a common strategy for engaging youth in policy implementation.
Co-designing occurs when youth and adults partner together to lead policy change. All three organizations co-design policy implementation strategies with young people. For example:
- One organization works with a youth advisory board to collaboratively adapt a sexual health education curriculum to meet the needs of foster youth. As a continued engagement strategy, advisory board members meet annually to observe how the curriculum is being delivered and provide feedback on what should change.
- Another partners with youth advocates to co-create outreach material and test messaging about a new tax credit to ensure that it resonates with youth with foster care experience.
- The third organization co-created a 10-Year Youth Master Plan with young people. Youth led outreach and ideation sessions, established feedback loops (a way to refine and adjust ideas by soliciting and analyzing feedback, implementing changes, and sharing with participating youth what those changes are), and identified specific policy and funding solutions they wanted their city to adopt.
Relationships are a critical part of successful youth engagement in policy implementation.
Authentic youth engagement requires that organizations have strong relationships with both young people and the public agency staff who are responsible for implementation. By building trust in these relationships, organizations can create continued opportunities for youth engagement. Our three responding organizations provided examples of what it might look like to develop and maintain these relationships:
- Offer to help and be a resource to the agencies and staff tasked with implementation.
- Develop relationships with and learn from specific groups of staff responsible for implementing new policies. Youth advisory board members facilitated focus groups with social workers to learn about barriers they face when talking about sexual health education with foster youth, and then designed solutions to those barriers.
- To open the door for youth engagement, partner with other organizations that bring established relationships with public agencies. Organizations, or partnerships of organizations, can create feedback loops between youth and the public agency.
Organizations often must make the case for why youth engagement matters.
As one example, they can share how engaging youth will support public agency staff and improve service delivery. The following suggestions can help organizations that are just starting to engage youth in this stage of the policy process. As you take these steps, involve young people as partners:
- Identify which public agencies implement policies relevant to your work and determine whether any of your own staff have relationships with them.
- Connect with peer organizations that have relationships with public agencies.
- Ask to meet with a public agency staff member to learn about what is going well, what challenges they face, and how your organization and the youth you engage might help them with a policy of interest.
- Create or participate in opportunities to monitor and evaluate how policies are implemented. This could include helping youth lead listening sessions to learn about implementation barriers and unintended outcomes and communicating findings to policymakers.
Suggested citation: Scott, A., Ball, J., & McKlindon, A. (2026). How organizations can effectively engage youth in policy implementation. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/5214h8194y