Creating Settings for Youth Empowerment and Leadership: An Ecological Perspective

Abstract

Youth development programs are increasingly focusing on youth empowerment and leadership, a shift which often requires adult staff to adopt new roles and practices. This article explores staff practice in the context of a multisite initiative designed to engage marginalized youth in social change through youth-led grants. Interviews with youth workers and managers revealed practices at multiple ecological levels. Individual-level practices supported youths’ capacities to participate. Group-level practices fostered social interactions and activities that actualized the youth-led approach. Setting-level practices created structures that supported and protected group activities while organization-level practices promoted a favorable environment for youth leadership. Analyzed from an ecological and activity settings perspective, these results contribute to understanding the multifaceted and complex nature of youth work in power-sharing practice models. Practice implications include identifying training needs to help practitioners navigate across multiple ecological levels and suggesting reflection questions for practitioners.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.