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The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume V, Number 1, 1999
Issue Topic: Children and Youth
Promising Practices
Kristen Zimmerman and Nancy Erbstein, Co-Directors of Community LORE, reveal how their organization promotes and supports youth participation in research, evaluation, and planning.
Democratic societies depend on the representation and participation of their members. Yet few organizations truly include the voices of stakeholders—particularly those of youth—in decision making and evaluation. The goals of Youth Empowerment Evaluation (YEE) are to increase youth voice in policies, programs, and organizations intended to serve them, and to enhance the ability of youth-serving organizations to effectively address and engage young people.
For nine years, Community LORE has promoted and supported youth participation in research, evaluation, and planning. Through our YEE initiative, we work as coaches, facilitators, and trainers (rather than evaluators) to develop the capacity of youth and adults to conduct youth-led evaluations. Young people gain the experience, skills, and concepts necessary to evaluate youth-serving organizations and to design organizational feedback loops that nurture learning, planning, and change. Adults learn to work in partnership with youth.
We work on four levels:
Two recent Community LORE projects include the Jamestown Community Center evaluation and the Juvenile Justice Evaluation Project (JJE; see next article). The Jamestown project engaged participants in the Center’s strategic planning process. We trained middle school aged youth to interview program participants and non-participants regarding their perceptions of the Center and their future program needs. For the JJE Project, Community LORE trained 12 youth to assess the impact of reforms on San Francisco’s juvenile justice system. We collaborated with Rising Youth for Social Equity, Delancy Street Foundation, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, and the Center for the Study of Social Change (University of California, Berkeley).
The following were critical to engaging and supporting youth evaluators:
YEE is a powerful process. Following are changes that these organizations initiated as a result of youth evaluations:
YEE promotes the systemic transformation of youth service organizations into institutions which value and fully utilize youth leadership and which address the genuine needs of youth, their families, and the broader community.
Community LORE’s YEE initiative develops the capacity of youth-serving organizations to engage youth in evaluation through coaching, curricula, training, and network development.
Community LORE is supported by the S.H. Cowell Foundation, the Grousebeck Family Fund, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation. Rising Youth for Social Equity and the JJE Project are supported by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the Luke B. Hancock Foundation.
Kristen Zimmerman
Co-Director
Nancy Erbstein
Co-Director
Community LORE
2017 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel: 415-621-1402
Email: comlore@igc.org