Providing Spark and Stability: The Role of Intermediary Organizations in Establishing School-Based Youth-Adult Partnerships

Abstract

The term “youth-adult partnership” increasingly is being used to define a relationship in which both youth and adults have the potential to contribute to decision making processes, to learn from one another, and to promote change. Establishing a relationship with an intermediary organization can provide much needed stability and sustainability to youth-adult partnerships–especially in school settings. Rather than creating generalizable findings, this article focuses on hypothesis generation regarding the ways in which an intermediary organization can provide the needed training and support to school-based youth-adult partnerships. Using a combination of case-study and survey data, the study finds that youth-adult partnerships need help with: youth leadership skill development, team building, project development, and targeted training for adults. Technical assistance needs vary depending on whether groups need to create a spark that will build the idea of a youth-adult partnership or to create stability for a youth-adult partnership that has already been developed

The authors would like to thank the Penn State's College of Education and the Children Youth and Families Consortium for funding this research. We also would like to acknowledge the following people who assisted with data collection and were either graduate or undergraduate students at The Pennsylvania State University during the time of the study: Christian Anderson, John Collins, Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, Katherine Heeren, Elizabeth Manning, Marcela Movit, Jessica Riepnieks, Amy Rogers, Tenisha Tevis, and Melissa Tibbits.

Notes

¹The Institute name, the Institute staff names, the Institute participant names and the participants' school names have all been changed to pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality.

Note. Demographic data for each school was retrieved from Schoolmatters.com on October 24, 2008.

²A post-conference survey of all of the conference participants was planned and attempted, but we could not secure a sufficient number of responses to warrant an analysis of the data.

³Students completed the life skills questionnaire by addressing how often (measure of frequency) they have used the following skills in the last 30 days: communicate, solve problems, make decisions and achieve goals in everyday life, by circling one of the responses in a Likert scale that ranges from 1–4, where: 1 = Never, 2 = Rarely, 3 = Sometimes, 4 = Always. The items under each life skill represent a specific sub-skill needed to successfully master that life skill (see Appendix B).

Note. Deerland respondents: N = 4–6 (compared to overall responses N = 161–164).

Note. Lakeside respondents: N = 4–6 (compared to overall responses: N = 161–164).

Note. Central High respondents: N = 4–6 (compared to overall responses: N = 161–164).

∗The Cronbach Alpha for this scale is within acceptable range, albeit at the lower end of the range.