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The Importance of Including Youth Voices

December 4, 2013 | Celsa Snead, Executive Director, The Mentoring Center

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Those of us who have taken on the responsibility of serving youth, understand that part of that responsibility is to ensure that youth voices are heard. Any agency or youth advocate will confirm that representing and reflecting youth perspectives accurately is often difficult and challenging, but extremely necessary, with rewards of situating youth at the center of the work and moving a youth-focused program or policy agenda forward.

Those of us who have taken on the responsibility of serving youth, understand that part of that responsibility is to ensure that youth voices are heard. Any agency or youth advocate will confirm that representing and reflecting youth perspectives accurately is often difficult and challenging, but extremely necessary, with rewards of situating youth at the center of the work and moving a youth-focused program or policy agenda forward.

The Mentoring Center has worked on behalf of young people, with specific expertise in working with system-involved youth, for more than 22 years. The Mentoring Center began as a training and technical assistance agency to build the capacity of youth-serving agencies and organizations to provide services and opportunities for young people involved in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Within a few short years, we began working with young men detained in California’s Division of Juvenile Justice (formerly the California Youth Authority) on a weekly basis through a program that we continue today. That program marked the beginning of our direct services and remains an essential part of the model we developed for pre- and post-detention and reentry services. In addition to the direct support we provide to youth and young adults, the most critical contribution of our services is to inform both our training practices and policy advocacy.

In many ways, our direct service programs, which include Transformative Mentoring groups and juvenile justice case management programs, are the “laboratories” in which we learn, directly from youth themselves, their needs, the challenges they face, and how we can best help them meet those needs and address those challenges. We have confirmed the importance of pre-release services, including relationship building between our staff and youth, to the successful reentry of many young people. We also have confirmed how our group-mentoring approach, often combined with individual mentoring and case management support, is more appropriate for youth who face more extreme challenges as a result of their involvement in the juvenile justice and/or foster care systems.

We also develop best practices and viable public policies based on youth responses about what works well. For example, when we supported the passage of Senate Bill 1088, legislation sponsored by State Senator Curren Price to ease youth’s return to schools after periods of detention, our support and subsequent testimony were based on specific and direct experience with the challenges of reenrolling youth in schools in their neighborhoods, many of which they attended prior to detention. We have direct knowledge of not only what barriers exist to reenrollment, but also the consequences youth face when they are prevented from returning to their own schools. Because we know of these barriers and consequences, we can advocate with a level of authenticity and expertise that ultimately benefits youth.

So, how do we continue to represent our youth accurately? Using viable evaluation processes and tools is crucial to meeting this goal. The challenge is to create an evaluation process that is comprehensive enough to capture complex and nuanced data and information, and accessible enough so that participating youth can respond in a way that allows The Mentoring Center to incorporate what youth have taught us. Youth evaluations, particularly for youth of color, marginalized youth, and youth programs and services, are often significantly flawed and have little utility; evaluators can be disconnected from and not reflective of young people and wholly unfamiliar with the programs and strategies they are evaluating.

When presented with the opportunity to work with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) for an evaluation project, we understood the positive implications such a partnership could have. Over the summer of 2012, a dedicated evaluator created an evaluation process that helped to measure the impact of our direct service work, specifically our Transformative Mentoring groups over one group’s six-month cycle. The evaluator designed our process so that we could determine what best practices in these groups were promising or well confirmed. More importantly, the evaluation process helped us clarify the youth participants’ self-identified goals, including critical thinking, connectedness, increased school achievement, and improved decision making. It was documented that these are the things youth want for themselves. Translating this into training tools and program strategies for other youth-serving agencies, or testimony for policy advocacy, is extremely meaningful for us. This enhances The Mentoring Center’s unique ability to use direct services, training and technical assistance, and policy to create the most positive impact on our youth. For The Mentoring Center, this ability is critical in giving power, authority, and accuracy to youth voices that often are not otherwise heard.

Celsa Snead has worked on behalf of youth in the areas of youth development, policy advocacy, and juvenile justice for over 15 years. She joined The Mentoring Center in 2003 as program director for an Oakland youth offenders court advocacy program. She became involved in the policy department, focusing specifically on juvenile justice, black men and boys, and gender policy issues. As executive director, she leads The Mentoring Center’s training and technical assistance, direct services for youth, and policy work. Her expertise is in juvenile justice policy, youth reentry, mentoring as a violence prevention strategy, and gender-specific services for system-involved girls.

Prior to this, she was deputy public defender, representing youth in the areas of dependency and delinquency. She also worked for the Urban Strategies Council, the Youth Law Center, and the ACLU of Northern California on the issues of race, gender, civil rights, and juvenile justice policy. She holds a master’s degree in public policy and a JD.