Youth Empowerment Solutions: Connecting Youth with Neighborhood Organizations to Create Community Change

Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities (YES) is a community level violence prevention project. Empowerment theory, positive youth development, and ecological theory guided the project development and evaluation design. The goals of the project are to provide youth with opportunities for meaningful involvement in preventing youth violence and creating community change, to enhance neighborhood organizations' ability to engage youth in their activities, and to change the social and physical environment to reduce and prevent violence. The components of the intervention include: 1) youth empowerment activities; 2) neighborhood organization development; and 3) community development projects that involve youth and organizations working together. Youth empowerment activities include workshops for program planning, budgeting, implementation, and evaluation; opportunities to assist their peers in community change efforts; developing ethnic identity and pride; and working with adults to achieve these goals. Neighborhood organization development includes assistance in creating positive youth development settings, and workshops to enhance staff skills for working with youth. Participating youth develop proposals that focus on community level change. Examples of these projects include community gardening and beautification, park revitalization, and community celebration events. The evaluation design includes a quasi-experimental pre-posttest comparison group design and analysis of multiple outcomes across levels of analysis. This presentation will describe the theoretical model that guided the project and the concomitant evaluation design. We will also present preliminary findings comparing intervention and comparison neighborhoods using several data sources including a school survey, neighborhood survey, police incident data, and environmental assessments of the areas surrounding neighborhood improvement projects.