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
The ‘new’ in our new reality
Ever since the pandemic began in March, we at Youth Catalytics have been talking about our collective...
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.
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.
Don’t call it “data-gathering.” Just start talking to people.
After compiling the top answers from 25 stakeholder interviews, this Board realized that stakeholders’ #1 response to the question about where their organization was most successful was “I don’t know.”
Serious about diversity? The first step is introspection.
If the drive toward diversity makes so much sense, why is actually achieving diversity so hard?
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.
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.
#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.
Teaching about trauma in schools and communities that have experienced it
Healing a system is not very different from healing an individual; it starts with awareness.
From our notebook: ‘I wouldn’t trust anyone, unless they could feel my pain
‘I’m 14 and dating a 35-year-old. My mom called the cops on me and not the dude.’
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?”
Podcast: Giving young people the chance — and the budget — to improve their community
These teens have made more than $285,000 in grants to over 70 nonprofit organizations in Worcester County, MA. Find out how in this 2017 podcast.
You developed the program. Now you want to get it out into the world.
Good news! A rigorous evaluation shows that your program works. Now what? This Q & A dives into how one developer marketed her new evidence-based program.
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.’
Words than can help your program, and words that definitely won’t
With all the very best intentions and for the best possible reasons, most of us routinely use phrases that aren’t helpful in telling the story of the work we do and the people we help.
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.
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.
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.
Pet-assisted therapy brings companion animals to children and teens in need
Pets are non-threatening, they give unconditional love, they boost everybody’s self-esteem. I was just reading notes children had written in a second-grade class I work with. One note said, ‘Maj-En gives me his paw. Maj-En loves me.’