Listen to our new Voices from the Field podcast with Steven Jella, Associate Executive Director for San Diego Youth Services. We discuss how his organization went from, “90% in-person services to 90% remote services in just 5 days” at the start of the pandemic, and how he has focused on preserving his workforce over this past year.

How about training young people to investigate issues and resources in their communities? How about teaching them how to collect and fact-check information, provide background and context, summarize it all for their peers — and do it in a way guaranteed to make adults take note?

Almost anyone who knows someone in middle or high school sees signs of the stress that is part of adolescence; I’ve talked with young people who cut, whose hair fell out in patches. But in these pandemic months, our stress has been as self-contained as everything else

It’s funny how often the variable that determines a program’s success isn’t a “best practice” at all. It’s how a given activity is actually done in real time, in an actual community, over many days, weeks and months, by the particular cast of people doing it.

Every research study is designed to demonstrate the relationship between one thing and another. It’s about action and consequences: If you do a particular thing, will another thing reliably happen? The benefit is that, done well, research tells you which way to go.