Amplifying Youth Voice and Cultivating Leadership Through Participatory Action Research

• In Event: 63.034 - Research for Justice: Challenging Discriminatory Policing, School Closures, and Youth Unemployment

Abstract

This paper by community activists explores a youth-led action research intervention in the employment opportunities available in an aggrieved Boston community. Participatory methods of measurement, innovation, and youth organizing strategies built local leadership and capacity to counteract the increase in area youth unemployment from 25% to 60% over a five year period. The grassroots, neighborhood-based initiative had a mission to “catalyze, equip, and empower a youth-driven and collaborative movement to eliminate barriers to success for youth of color in Boston’s neighborhoods and beyond.” Their vision was for all youth to have the resources, opportunities, and support to succeed, and the group strived to address the many barriers – low employment, underperforming schools, lack of opportunity, poverty, trauma, violence, and more – that get in the way for low-income and youth of color. With a belief that many of the solutions lie in developing the power and voice of youth themselves, the project applied a youth-led model of participatory action research and combined training and hands-on experience in community organizing, civic engagement, participatory action research, innovation methods, data analysis, career exploration, and soft skill development to equip young people for personal success and as leaders in transforming their communities. Young leaders worked in collaboration with businesses, government, and other community stakeholders to identify and creatively address critical youth needs. This youth-driven model informed businesses and government through research and technology, innovated solutions to existing or emerging problems, and influenced policy for sustained change on issues that affect youth.

This paper recounts the story of this impactful YPAR project from the perspective of the youth themselves as well as from the project leadership in relation to common sets of ethical, epistemological, and political issues identified in dialogue with community engaged scholars. This YPAR project highlights how the amplification of youth voice and leadership can promote change at both the level of the individual youth who participate and also at the level of the social and economic structures that create the barriers to a flourishing life. The symposium presentation will go beyond the paper and also tell a cautionary tale about the fragility of such projects, since this particular one ended in 2017 after the paper was written. The paper includes an explanation of the need and initial conditions from which the project emerged; a discussion of its use of YPAR, including benefits and challenges of the approach; a summary of the key research findings of their project and the policy and action agendas they supported; an examination of PAR’s usefulness for knowledge creation, including benefits and challenges; and an analysis of youth leadership and ownership in the model, also including benefits and challenges. Finally, the conclusion will tie these aspects together and suggest ways from a community leadership perspective that this approach can be useful for building youth leadership more broadly into school and community change efforts.

Author

• Rachele Gardner, Youth Hub Boston