Views & News

Interviews, essays, podcasts, news from both inside and outside Youth Catalytics: you’ll find it all here. We welcome your ideas, input, conjectures, rejoinders and anything else you have say. We’re a community of professionals who care about young people, and want the information and opinions expressed here to be as vital and vibrant as they are.

 

Add your expertise to our latest Views & News feature: Voices From The Field. Contact Mindi Wisman for more information at mwisman@youthcatalytics.org

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Melanie Wilson Melanie Wilson

Estimating the number of unstably housed youth in your community

The Homeless Youth Estimation Project is designed to provide a reliable estimate of the number of youth in any given school district who have left home and are living somewhere else — a car, a friend’s house, with a boyfriend or girlfriend — temporarily.

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Cindy Carraway-Wilson Cindy Carraway-Wilson

Find your happy place. Seriously.

Happiness as a state of mind — rather than a passing emotional state — can be developed with practice. By cultivating workplace happiness, programs can both reduce employee turnover and increase client satisfaction.

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Jennifer A. Smith Jennifer A. Smith

Communicating with a purpose: the webinars

These webinars were created for programs promoting adolescent sexual health, but draw on universal communications strategies and share important advice for all nonprofits.

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Guest User Guest User

Best practice? Not exactly. It’s even better.

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.

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Melanie Wilson Melanie Wilson

#MeToo, and what it probably won’t mean for poor girls

About 10 years ago, we started hearing from our direct-service colleagues that the girls in their programs were facing new pressures to look and act in sexual ways. While children in state care had always been at higher risk of sexual abuse than other kids, with all the attending behavioral fallout, it seemed like something new was happening. Something in the culture, perhaps.

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Jennifer A. Smith Jennifer A. Smith

Making room in your program for volunteers

These stories shifted my focus from “What does our agency need that volunteers can give us?” to “What do I sit in my office just wishing someone would do for my clients once in a while?”

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Q & A Jennifer A. Smith Q & A Jennifer A. Smith

Engaging youth in creating digital health messages

‘When you ask teens to develop content for their peers, the tendency is for them to regurgitate the same finger-wagging messaging that has been targeted at them for so long. Part of what you need to do with teens is teach them how to effectively reach their peers by generating messaging that is appealing, not alienating.’

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Melanie Wilson Melanie Wilson

Politics aside, this is what remains

In the 1970s, our field barely existed. Now it does, because we built it. And we’re not simply fumbling along, doing our best. We’re being effective. There’s incalculable power in that.

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Cindy Carraway-Wilson Cindy Carraway-Wilson

Learning cultural humility in Hawaii

If you’ve ever brushed up against the US Census, you know that these folks are collectively known as “Pacific Islanders.” So they’re one race, ethnicity, and culture, right? Wrong. Well, they’re essentially the same, right? Wrong.

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Guest User Guest User

Confessions of a reluctant grantwriter

In 1981, when I received my masters from Harvard Divinity School, our class of soon-to-be poorly paid pastors, community organizers, theologians and activists found ourselves marching into Harvard Yard right next to the soon-to-be handsomely paid graduating class of Harvard Business School.

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