Strengthening the practice of meaningful youth engagement, including in youth employment programs, reflects a growing acknowledgement of young people's role and need to be engaged in decisions affecting their lives. While still understudied, there is increasing awareness among funders of youth engagement's added value to programs, particularly in increasing a program's responsiveness and quality, as well as longer-term benefits resulting from the engagement of young people in various stages of the program life cycle. This document has been developed to guide and equip funders and stakeholders ... Show more
Strengthening the practice of meaningful youth engagement, including in youth employment programs, reflects a growing acknowledgement of young people's role and need to be engaged in decisions affecting their lives. While still understudied, there is increasing awareness among funders of youth engagement's added value to programs, particularly in increasing a program's responsiveness and quality, as well as longer-term benefits resulting from the engagement of young people in various stages of the program life cycle. This document has been developed to guide and equip funders and stakeholders with tools and information to support the integration of meaningful youth engagement into youth employment programming and strategies. To do so, the paper outlines why meaningful youth engagement is important, what meaningful youth engagement is and how it could be embedded across various stages of the program life cycle, as well as within a funder's strategy and culture. Bearing in mind that funders are at different stages of their journeys, the heterogeneity of young people and the wide range of youth employment program interventions, the roadmap's recommendations are both immediately actionable and aspirational.
This paper is the result of the analysis carried out by Plan International. The roadmap identifies the 'who,' 'why,' 'when' and, most importantly, 'how' when it comes to involving young people as partners in youth employment programming. It has been developed to support funders and practitioners in their efforts to embed youth voices and rights into their programming by considering two key research questions: (1) What are the key phases of youth engagement in the planning, governance, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of youth employment programs? (2) What concrete steps can youth employment funders take to strengthen their own youth engagement strategies?
The roadmap is divided into several interconnected sections: an Introduction section, which frames the discussion in subsequent sections; the Research Methodology and Summary of Findings section, which outlines the methodology that directed our approach and a summary of data collection findings; the Defining Meaningful Youth Engagement in Youth Employment Programs section, which proposes a definition for meaningful youth engagement and presents a framework to operationalize this concept in youth employment programs; and a Roadmap to Meaningful Youth Engagement in Action section, which builds on the framework by providing entry points for mainstreaming meaningful youth engagement in programs - these come in the form of milestones and action steps per program life-cycle stage and into organizational strategies.
Edited excerpts from publication.
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Authors:
Caluag, Iris; Trew, John Barret; Moubayed-Haidar, Lea ... [+] Show more
Caluag, Iris;
Trew, John Barret;
Moubayed-Haidar, Lea;
Manahan, Christian;
Menez, Erika;
Corpus, Jose Enrique;
Domingo, Simon;
Yang, Ann;
Fischer, Catalina;
Ezzes, Kate [-] Show less
Published:
[Place of publication not identified], Citi Foundation, 2021
Resource type: Report, paper or authored book
Physical description: ix, 40 p. (report) + 5 p. (executive summary) + i, 19 p. (annexes) + 1 Excel spreadsheet
Access item:
https://www.planusa.org/youthvoices