Youth guidance12/30/2023 The mission of Youth Guidance is to create and implement school based programs so students can remove obstacles, focus on education, and ultimately succeed in school and in life. Would you mind sharing a bit about the organization and what you’re doing there? Speaking of new opportunities, you recently started as Executive Director at Youth Guidance DC. By the end of 2019, I had an offer to be a director somewhere else. After engaging with my fellow cohort members I realized I was selling myself short and needed to look for something else. I don't think I would have looked outside of my lane were it not for Rising Leaders. At that time I was a Program Manager, but then I began looking at other opportunities to really execute all of these leadership theories. After doing the Rising Leaders program, and engaging with my peers in that program and with folks who graduated the Signature Program, I started to look a lot wider than that narrow lane I was in. And while I was practicing to help other executives lead successful organizations, I subconsciously left myself a very tiny lane with not a lot of space to move around. I’d read the books, done the workshops, even led the workshops, but theory and practice have to come together at some point. Having come up through youth leadership positions to adult leadership positions, and actually training young leaders, I thought I knew it all. Rising Leaders was a wonderful experience. What did you take away from that experience, and has it helped you navigate the past couple years? Obviously the world is a bit different now. You graduated the Rising Leaders program in 2019. Therefore, instead of seeing the RCT results as the summation of evaluation efforts, staff see them as crucial indicators that guide the program’s ongoing development.Each quarter, we feature a past participant of the Rising Leaders program in a section we call "Leaders on the Rise." For this installment, we spoke with Rasheem Rooke (RL ’19), executive director of Youth Guidance DC about his new position, the foundations of Youth Guidance, and words of advice for other participants in LGW programs. These variations have driven Youth Guidance staff members to ask questions that are key to understanding how to achieve greater impact. But the results vary across different BAM sites, programs of different length, and different studies. BAM has undergone several well-designed RCTs, and the overall positive results show increases in high school graduation rates and decreases in arrests. The BAM program complemented impact studies with qualitative methods to more deeply understand the program’s core components and mechanisms. This case study shows that understanding and improving a program is an ongoing process-one that does not end with one or even multiple RCTs. From 2009 to 2015, BAM was evaluated through several randomized controlled trials (RCT), with each RCT extending the program’s reach to serve more and more youth across more schools, and a qualitative study to assess its impacts. To date, BAM has been implemented in schools in both Chicago and Boston. Program participants attend weekly group sessions for at least a year, receiving individual counseling, and they are exposed to a 30-lesson curriculum with diverse activities. The program supports the young men’s abilities to navigate a healthy transition to manhood by providing cognitive behavioral therapy, a peer group led by a facilitator they can relate with, and development of social emotional skills and important values. This case study draws on the experiences of one organization, Youth Guidance, and one of its programs, Becoming A Man (BAM™), to illustrate how the organization’s leadership and staff use diverse evaluation findings to generate important questions in a continuous process of strengthening its evidence base.īAM is a program for young men in high school, particularly young men of color living in disadvantaged communities. To address the challenges and opportunities in the youth development field (and in many other fields), a growing number of nonprofit leaders, funders, and researchers have embraced the use of research to demonstrate, understand, and improve the impacts of social programs. Moreover, experimental evaluations of such programs often show limited impact and replicability. Effective and engaging social programs for disadvantaged young people are challenging to develop, operate, and sustain. Young people need developmental opportunities to help them thrive, both now and into adulthood.
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