Five Things You Can Do Now to Increase Emotional Safety

By Sam Piha 

Sam Piha

We have known for decades that promoting young people’s sense of physical and emotional safety is foundational for any expanded learning program. This has been reinforced by research on the brain, learning, and trauma-informed practice and is the number one quality standard created by state and national entities.

The knowledge about the importance of safety in expanded learning programs is so ubiquitous that we chose to not include it in our LIAS learning principles. However, recent events at the southern border has shined a light on the importance of promoting young people’s sense of safety.

Below, we share text from a chapter on promoting safety from the Community Network for Youth Development’s Youth Development Guide: Engaging young people in after-school programming.

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FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW TO INCREASE SAFETY 

1. Develop group agreements regarding safety and regular group meetings to ensure that everyone feels physically and emotionally safe.
Conduct a meeting with the program participants early on to express the commitment that in your program “every person has the right to feel safe, included, and accepted.” Ask participants to define what these terms mean to them, and what agreements and rules they want to make to ensure the right of safety. Decide together what happens when the safety agreements are broken. Train young people in a process to resolve differences and decide at what point an adult should be asked to intervene.

Photo Credit: Great Valley Writing Project

2. Institute a regular group or “community” check-in meeting.
If issues of safety and relationship building are important, set aside a regular time for the group to reflect on their experience in the program and to suggest ways in which the peer group can work together even better. Make room in the meeting for people to share appreciations for their peers who are contributing to making the program a positive, safe place. [See previous LIAS blog posts on this topic.] 

3. Include “no put-downs” in your group agreements.
When developing group agreements with young people, a request for a “no put- down” rule will usually surface early in the discussion. [Note: for those preferring an alternative agreement avoiding the negative "NO", try “respect yourself and others”. This is a broad agreement and needs to be “unpacked” with the participants.] 

It is important to discuss with the young people how everyone will support its enforcement. This takes real commitment, as many young people have learned to use “put-downs” as a defense against being hurt themselves. Adult staff members will have to follow through with great consistency, offering reminders that ask members to hold to this agreement, especially in the beginning. Take every slur you hear seriously, even if it is in a teasing tone or participants claim it is okay. It is not okay because slurs hurt. It is helpful to hold group discussions or activities around “put-downs”, why they hurt, and what we can do instead. As young people come to trust that you will enforce this policy, you will see a reduction in the number of “put-downs”, and the sense of safety in the program will grow. Learning the benefits of interacting without this kind of hurtful behavior at an early age teaches young people a profound lesson in the value of mutual respect. 

4. Assess the cultural, gender, ethnic, and family structure background of your group.
Without asking unnecessarily probing questions, do what you can to learn who is in your program. Do the staff members and volunteers reflect these backgrounds? Do images and books in the classroom? Program activities and celebrations? Are there differences in who comes to program, who participates in which activities, which parents feel welcome at events?

5. Expand the group’s knowledge of particular groups and cultures. 

Photo Credit: TheOdysseyOnline.com

Start by educating yourself. Avoid tokenizing young people or others in your program or school by asking them to explain their culture. Instead, go to the library, look on the internet, attend local cultural events, and call or visit organizations promoting equity for the group you are researching. Learn what you can about the history, art, literature, music, food, celebrations, and struggles of a culture or group. Then help the young people in your program study different cultures and celebrate the contributions of different groups. You might learn about women, people of color, and gay people who have contributed to your neighborhood. Celebrate various holidays as they are celebrated in different countries. Celebrate Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Gay Pride Month, or Cesar Chavez’s Birthday. Young people can present what they’ve learned, and adults may be willing to share food, decorations, or music. Don’t make assumptions about what any particular person might share. Be sure that these celebrations are part of an ongoing process of inclusion and education, and that some groups aren’t just segregated to certain “diversity days.”

A Tribute to CNYD, Part 2

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

As a former practitioner and CNYD staff person, I was saddened to receive an announcement letter from Founder and Executive Director, Sue Eldredge, that the Community Network for Youth Development (CNYD) was closing its doors. To review the full announcement letter and where you can still access CNYD resources, click here. 

CNYD served as a true pioneer in promoting the ideas of youth development by creating youth program training methods and tools, and a large demonstration through a citywide initiative, the San Francisco Beacon Initiative. CNYD staff had a large influence on the early afterschool movement in California, producing the Youth Development Guide for Afterschool with CDE and for advocating and offering training for the first statewide high school afterschool initiative in the United States. CNYD also served as a training ground for some of the most influential trainers and consultants in the afterschool field. 

CNYD has generously allowed the Learning in Afterschool & Summer project, and other leading organizations, to post CNYD's publications and tools on their websites. You can access those by going to our research and literature page and scrolling down. Access the page by clicking here.  

You can join us in thanking CNYD for all its contributions to the field and your work by adding a message of appreciation to this group card by July 15, 2013.

I contacted Sue Eldredge for responses to a few questions. Below is part 2 of a conversation with Sue Eldredge. 

Q: What do you believe is CNYD’s legacy?

A: I think CNYD's greatest contributions to the field have been in the practice arena with breakthroughs in assessing program quality and youth experience to drive continuous improvement at program and organizational levels.  When the field was struggling to define realistic and legitimate measures of accountability and tangled in debates that mostly centered on longer-term measures of healthy development, CNYD was an important force that shifted the conversation to focus on more immediate measures of program quality and the resulting developmental experiences of young people in youth programs and youth organization settings.  We were fortunate to form a very productive practice/research partnership with Jim Connell and Michelle Gambone to

Sue Eldredge

develop the CNYD's Youth Development Framework for Practice, associated measures of quality youth experience and one of the first research-based youth survey instruments.  These tools were used in learning communities that engaged youth workers and organizational leaders in continuous improvement processes that led to some of the first examples of youth development supports and opportunities that were "measureable and moveable".  This work was recognized in the National Academy of Science's study, Community Programs to Promote Youth Development, the definitive research effort that validated the youth development field's contributions to the healthy development of young people.  This field blazing work has had long-lasting influence in the afterschool and out-of-school time fields and is evident in the widespread focus on program quality improvement.

In the practice arena, CNYD was on the forefront of innovations in training and capacity-building.  We were one of the first youth development intermediary organizations to shift from traditional training approaches to lead learning communities where practitioners knowledge was mined to promote peer exchange and learning.  Some of our earliest professional development in the mid-1990's taught practitioners how to integrate assessment into practice so they could use the data that program leaders collected to understand if the new practices they were putting into action were making a difference for young people,  These new approaches set a standard for the field of youth development capacity-building. 

In very practical terms, CNYD's talented staff and those we worked with helped shape the youth development field in the Bay Area that we know today.  When our work began no one identified professionally as belonging to the youth development field.  The community of practitioners that CNYD supported grew over time to become just that—a professional community that identified as a unified field, with a shared vision and values, common practices and standards of accountability.  Most importantly, the youth development community came to identify as allies and partners working with young people to support them to grow up with optimism in the future, in communities where healthy relationships with adults and their peers are fostered, and with meaningful opportunities to contribute, to lead and build real skills.  While CNYD is sometimes described as an important catalyst for this field development, it was the rich partnerships we were so fortunate to have at all levels that enabled all of these gains.

Q: As you look ahead, what do you see as the major hurdles that the youth development field will face in the future?

A: The youth development field's commitment to the holistic development of young people and the principles of partnership and respect for young people are deeply rooted.  Skilled practitioners have always worked with young people from this place of understanding.  In many ways we took great concern not to name the "youth development movement" as new, but rather an important shift in focus at a policy level.  The real field breakthroughs were at a practice level.  In order to keep the field alive and thriving we will need to continue to reframe and refresh key youth development principles and practices so that they are relevant to the current dialogue and focus for policymakers, funders and practitioners.  You can see this demonstrated artfully in strands of the work that are being done at the Forum for Youth Investment, the Weichert Center for Youth Program Quality and in the Learning in Afterschool and Summer learning principles that are guiding afterschool work.  There are some very promising new research understandings about how young people grow and learn, especially in the arena of neuroscience.  Aligning this new understanding of research to practice to provide new and better ways to support young people's development seems very promising.

Q: Do you want to share your future plans?

A: After so many years of leading and growing CNYD, I am pausing to catch my breath and look with fresh eyes at new opportunities. I am intrigued by the potential that neuroscience research has to inform break-throughs in practice.  I am loving having more relaxed time to spend with my nine year old daughter Gracie.  And I am extremely thankful for my years leading CNYD and for the incredibly talented and committed staff and colleagues that surrounded me.  It was a very unique point in time when so many forces and talented people were aligned to have influence.  I have been extremely fortunate to have had my personal passions align with my professional commitments.   

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Sue Eldredge was the founder and Executive Director of the Community Network for Youth Development (CNYD) for twenty years. CNYD’s work led to the infusion of youth development practice into policy, capacity-building and evaluation efforts in the Bay Area and in ever wider arenas.  A graduate of Stanford University, Sue’s past experience includes work in the philanthropic world, research, and design and delivery of training and technical assistance systems for nonprofit, educational and governmental agencies.

CNYD, A Pioneer in the Youth Development Field, Is Closing Its Doors, Part 1

By Sam Piha

Sam Piha

As a former practitioner and CNYD staff person, I was saddened to receive an announcement letter from Founder and Executive Director, Sue Eldredge, that the Community Network for Youth Development (CNYD) was closing its doors. CNYD served as a true pioneer in promoting the ideas of youth development by creating youth program training methods and tools, and a large demonstration through a citywide initiative, the San Francisco Beacon Initiative. CNYD staff had a large influence on the early afterschool movement in California, producing the Youth Development Guide for Afterschool with CDE and for advocating and offering training for the first statewide high school afterschool initiative in the United States. CNYD also served as a training ground for some of the most influential trainers and consultants in the afterschool field. 

I reached out to a few of my colleagues to get their response to CNYD's closing. You can also join us in thanking CNYD for all its contributions to the field and your work by adding a message of appreciation to this group card by July 15, 2013.

Below are comments from national, state, and local leaders in the field followed by a few quotes from my recent conversation with Sue Eldredge. 

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Karen Pittman

"CNYD was a pioneer, not just in advancing the core principles of youth development, but in bringing people together across sectors to support youth, and in organizational capacity building. CNYD’s work over the past two decades to deepen, strengthen and support the work of youth organizations and youth workers led the way and set a high bar for the many youth development and after-school intermediaries now operating across the nation. To ensure that we and others continue to learn from their pioneering work, we are happy to showcase terrific resources developed by CNYD over the years: http://sparkaction.org/content/cnyd-resources" - Karen Pittman, President and CEO, Forum for Youth Investment

Michael Funk

"Very early in my career, CNYD helped me understand the asset based movement in the early 1990s. I remember a CNYD conference on Community and Youth Development. It was one of the first of it's kind. CNYD also supported me as the new director of the Sunset Neighborhood Beacon Center where I met Sam Piha for the first time.  I "cut my teeth" for the work I do now through the work of CNYD. I am now the After School Division Director at the California Department of Education. I continually draw upon and benefit from the lessons learned from the staff at CNYD. Thanks to Sue, for being an early pioneer in our collective work!" - Michael Funk, Director of the After School Division, California Department of Education

Claudia Jasin

"Jamestown’s work with CNYD in the late 1990’s set the course for the our steadfast commitment to providing kids in our programs with the highest-quality youth development experience.  Over the years, CNYD provided invaluable training, tools, and advocacy to support our work towards this goal.  To this day, we are still using many of those resources when training our staff or talking to funders. In a nutshell, CNYD has left an indelible fingerprint on the organization." - Claudia Jasin, Executive Director, Jamestown Community Center

Katie Brackenridge

"I was in the first Youth Development Learning Network, back in 1997.  It was so exciting to find out that all the things I thought could work for youth actually fit into a framework, linked to research and with specific strategies for implementation.  What a relief and resource!  More than 15 years later, the supports and opportunities still underpin my work in youth services, policy and advocacy.   And, there are CNYD trainees and staff anchoring excellent youth service organizations around California.  I am continually grateful for the creativity, innovation and critical thinking that made CNYD such a powerful agent of change for youth and the people who work with them." - Katie Brackenridge, Sr. Director, Out of School Time Initiatives, Partnership for Children and Youth

AN INTERVIEW WITH CNYD'S SUE ELDREDGE

Q: Can you describe why and how CNYD was originally formed? 

Sue Eldredge

A: In 1992, the Carnegie Foundation on Adolescent Development published A Matter of Time: Risk and Opportunity in the Non-School Hours, the result of five years of study highlighting the contributions of the largely invisible community-based youth serving sector.  During the same period, I led a local community research project based at the Stanford Center for the Study of Children, Youth and Their Families, that highlighted the important ways grassroots community agencies throughout the Bay Area were responding to the unmet needs of young people outside of the schools.  The study was shaped and guided by an advisory group of organizational leaders and youth workers from agencies doing some of the most exciting and groundbreaking work locally. We surveyed, interviewed and brought together over 1000 Bay Area practitioners to talk about their work and how it could be strengthened.  One of the resounding recommendations was the need for an organization that could support this growing and almost invisible sector. Our earliest efforts centered on educating the public, policymakers and funders about the growing youth development field and providing professional development opportunities for youth workers.  We were greatly influenced by the leadership and early framing and language that Karen Pittman and her colleagues at the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research provided and connections to a handful of other colleagues that were just beginning to provide emerging intermediary support for the youth development field.

Q: Can you say a few words about why CNYD is closing its doors?

A: It was a difficult and long deliberated decision to close CNYD after so many years of contribution to the field and lasting impact.  However, in the current climate, there is simply neither the sustained focus on youth development nor the resources necessary to work deeply in ways that take advantage of CNYD's unique capacities for longer lasting systems change.  Organizations have lifecycles and the Board and I are felt that CNYD had amply fulfilled its mission to build and support the youth development field.  There are many skilled organizations and individuals that continue to provide youth development training and we have made our sizable resources available so that they can be used by all that carry on the important work of youth development capacity building.

Q: What do you believe are the major contributions that CNYD brought to the youth service field?

A: We are very proud of CNYD's long lasting influence.  Our approach and our resources continue to be evident in the work of many organizations throughout the Bay Area.  These are some high points of all that was accomplished over two decades by so many talented CNYD staff working in partnership with the Bay Area youth development community:

• In the early 1990's CNYD played an important role in galvanizing support for the growing youth development movement throughout the Bay Area, educating and mobilizing youth organization leaders, practitioners, policymakers and funders.

• As widespread acceptance of a focus on positive development was cemented, CNYD was in the forefront nationally, developing training and assessment resources that supported the field to make breakthrough changes in practice, and move us from principles and ideals to measurable outcomes in our work with young people. 

CNYD's footprint is also  very strong in the afterschool and out-of-school arenas. 

• CNYD served as the intermediary for the first six years of the San Francisco Beacons Initiative, the first and largest California school-based project, demonstrating the importance of community-based agencies working in partnership with schools to create youth development-centered supports and services.  Fifteen years later, the San Francisco Beacon Center continues to flourish as a long-term part of the fabric of the youth services system in San Francisco. 

• Because of CNYD's Beacon leadership, we were called upon to work across California in the early years of federal and state funding for the expansion of school-based afterschool programs.  CNYD played an important role in helping policymakers and practitioners understand why youth development practice was critical to the impact of afterschool programming and developed training resources and approaches that are still used today.  We championed the expansion of high school afterschool programming and we were an important influence in broadening afterschool outcomes to include measures beyond academic learning.

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Sue Eldredge was the founder and Executive Director of the Community Network for Youth Development (CNYD) for twenty years. CNYD’s work led to the infusion of youth development practice into policy, capacity-building and evaluation efforts in the Bay Area and in ever wider arenas.  A graduate of Stanford University, Sue’s past experience includes work in the philanthropic world, research, and design and delivery of training and technical assistance systems for nonprofit, educational and governmental agencies.