Evaluation Specialist University of Minnesota Extension Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
Abstract Information: The University of Minnesota Extension Center for Youth Development has a long history of leadership in the field of youth development and is best known for running Minnesota 4-H. Minnesota 4-H aims to provide young people with the opportunity to learn by developing a passion in their areas of interest and lead by being innovators and social change agents. For the 2023 program year, our evaluation team partnered with program leaders to provide further opportunities for 4-H'ers to learn and lead by developing evaluation capacity in youth across the state. Evaluators and program leaders trained youth to facilitate focus groups and interviews with their peers, both equipping youth with evaluative tools and collaborating to develop questions and protocols that reflect program outcomes and youth experiences, prioritizing youth leaders' and participants' stories. In Minnesota 4-H programs, youth design and lead their own learning opportunities guided by adults. This unique, learn-by-doing youth development model teaches young people essential, transferable skills that they'll use throughout their lives, such as problem-solving, decision-making, coping, communicating and responding to the needs of others. In building their evaluative capacity we not only continue this important work– but empower them to control the context and narrative of the stories that inform our evaluative judgment and program decision-making.
Relevance Statement: Informed by Positive Youth Development and Leadership theories and practice, the youth development professionals at the University of Minnesota Extension do important work in caring for and youth-centered practice. In the same way, our evaluation team has consistently used theory-driven approaches in data collection and analysis, and focused our efforts to amplifying the stories of youth in our programs to stakeholders across the state. Yet, while our team has always sought to amplify youth voice and capture useful data that tells a story, we’ve noticed the gap in our current evaluation plan is youth-led methods that not only capture youth voice, but are shaped by it. In reflecting on the theme for AEA 2023 in the context of my experience working alongside the youth development professionals at the University of Minnesota Extension, I was struck by the parallels in our new programming and evaluation efforts for this year. Our adaptions to the overall evaluation plan were directly shaped not only by the stories we had seen in other forms of data, but by the stories of dedicated youth workers who noticed an important perspective in the storyline was missing. The point of this paper and the conference presentation is to report on our process for developing a program to build evaluative capacity in youth and more importantly to use their data and perspectives to drive our impact reporting and program decisions.
