Framing Youth-Adult Partnership and the Struggle for Collective Well-Being

• In Event: Building Trust, Sharing Power: The Promises and Challenges of Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Programs

Abstract

Overview, Background & Purpose

Youth-adult partnerships are the practice of: “(a) multiple youth and multiple adults deliberating and acting together, (b) in a collective [democratic] fashion, (c) over a sustained period of time, (d) through shared work, (e) intended to promote social justice, strengthen an organization and/or affirmatively address a community issue” (Zeldin, Christens, & Powers 2012, p. 388). While intergenerational partnerships have long existed in both school- and community-based programs, the specific principles and practices that underlie these partnerships has been underexplored. In particular, few researchers have written about the interpersonal and organizational processes that foster authentic youth-adult partnership work.

Seeking to fill this gap, this paper shares a set of overarching principles and practices that emerge from our forthcoming volume on youth-adult partnerships, which includes the voices of both youth and adult partners.

Theoretical Framework

Synthesizing learning from across the chapters of our forthcoming volume, we propose a set of principles that are foundational to effective youth-adult partnerships: trust, problem-posing methodologies, democratic participation, and collective action. We argue that these principles underlie Zeldin and colleagues (2012) four core elements of youth-adult partnerships; in so doing, they help articulate the necessary quality of decision-making, mentoring, reciprocal activity, and community connectedness.

Findings & Significance

Together, we identified four principles that are foundational to effective intergenerational work: trust, problem-posing methodologies, democratic participation, and collective action. We identified trust-building as both foundational to the work of youth-adult partnerships and a central outcome of the work. Problem-posing relationships are a key mechanism through which trust is built. Problem-posing methodologies hold that both adults and youth have critical questions and insights to share. In this sense, relationships and programs that draw on problem-posing methodologies often start with a set of goals and an accompanying toolbox, rather than a set curriculum or scope-and-sequence. Built upon a foundation of trust and nurtured by the problem-posing methodologies, these partnerships also require democratic participation, in which all members of a community have a voice and agency in decisions. Democratic participation is typically defined as a set of processes through which citizens or constituents influence decisions that impact their lives, either directly or through representation (Verba, 1967; Verba, Schlozman & Brady, 1995). Finally, collective action indicates the importance of shared work toward the purpose of collective transformation. In other words, without a shared commitment to individual and collective wellbeing, as well as the positive transformation of organizations and communities, authentic youth-adult partnerships often fall short. Having described these four foundational principles, we will share a set of interpersonal and organizational practices that nurture positive youth-adult partnerships (Table 1).

Together, the principles and practices shared in this paper provide important insights into the interpersonal and organizational processes that foster youth-adult partnerships. These insights are particularly important for out-of-school time programs, where relationships often form the backbone for positive youth development (Akiva, Cortina & Smith, 2014; Deschenes et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2011); however, they also provide a powerful alternative to the hierarchical relationships of traditional schools.

Author

• Jessica T. Fei, Sadie Nash Leadership Project