Youth-adult partnerships are a powerful means to nurture and amplify youths' voices and create social change. Drawing on our own framework, critical positive youth development, and our experience pilot testing the #PassTheMicYouth curriculum, we identified four promising practices to cultivate youth-adult partnerships. 4-H professionals can use…

Nationally, the 4-H Youth Development Program utilizes more than 350,000 adult volunteers annually, and 25% of the nation's K-12 students identify as Hispanic or Latino; however, there is a dearth of published literature on Latino volunteerism in the 4-H Youth Development Program. Developmental relationships, a critical component of realizing…

Introduction: In 2021, leaders in Birmingham, Alabama established one of the first LGBTQ-affirming charter schools in the United States to serve students who have dropped out, are not thriving in traditional schools, or are enrolled in home-school programs. Methods: Using deductive analysis, our research team filtered data through the five…

Concerned with the ongoing youth mental crisis in the United States, researchers intentionally planned for positive youth development (PYD) practices in nature. Educators, appreciating the critical importance of youth developing relationships and a sense of belonging, may regard this model as a powerful tool to enhance existing programs. Both…

Like many youth development programs, most youth mentoring programs do not have prescribed practices that target specific outcomes. Because the construct of mentoring represents a broad range of potential activities, researchers face a conundrum when making generalizable causal inferences about the effects of this and similar services. On the one…

This paper analyzes the dataset collected from students participating in the Boy With A Ball (BWAB) program, a faith-based community outreach group, through the Hemingway Measure of Adult Connectedness©, a questionnaire measuring the social connectedness of adolescents. This paper first approaches the data in the conventional method provided by…

Youth Thrive believes that all young people should be valued, loved, and supported to reach their goals. To achieve this, Youth Thrive works with youth-serving systems and its partners to change policies, programs, and practices so that they build on what we know about adolescent development, value young people's perspectives, and give youth…

A promising approach to support positive youth development is having adolescents serve as teachers for younger children. Through a qualitative interview study, we explored adolescents' development in their role serving as teachers for younger elementary-age children during out-of-school time; programs were managed by the University of California…

In this thought leader commentary, we review the potential devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on young people, including trauma, impacts on mental health, socioemotional distress, and changes in academic learning. Stating that 4-H is uniquely positioned to mitigate these effects through intentional positive youth development efforts, we…

Background: Sport-based youth development (SBYD) programs aim to teach life skills to youth within a physical activity context. An explicit objective of most SBYD programs is that youth learn to apply, or transfer, life skills beyond the sports program. Limited research has been conducted on the cognitive processes that help youth understand how…

Relationships are the foundation upon which all youth development rests. Young people grow, learn, and develop through relationships. Relationships socialize youth and subsequently encourage identity development. Relationships provide connection, a necessity for all humans. Supportive relationships promote positive academic, behavioral, and…

Youth-adult relationships exist on a continuum from adult-led to youth-led collaborations. However, research suggests that quality youth-adult partnerships, which fall in the middle of this continuum, directly contribute to positive youth development. Given this, the current study evaluated the impact of a 4-H Youth Development program, using…

Youth development professionals (YDPs) working at community-based organizations are in a unique position to interact with the adolescents because they are neither parents/guardians nor teachers. The objectives of this study were to explore qualitatively what sexual health issues adolescents discuss with YDPs and to describe those issues using the…

This article focuses on the experiences of alumni adolescents on the contribution of a Youth Opportunities Programme, a non-profit after-school education programme presented in Namibia. A qualitative descriptive design was used to provide insight into the contribution of this programme. Five focus groups were conducted with 32 participants. The…

Rolling with Resilience (RwR) provides a springboard for developing strategies that build strengths and supports to foster developmental assets in children and youth (Benson, Scales, & Roehlkepartain, 2011). In Circle of Courage terms, resilience is strengthened by opportunities for Belonging, Mastery, Independence, and Generosity (Brendtro,…