Youth Development
Youth Engagement Innovation Fund
School & Main Institute
Coaching and Technical Assistance
2024 - Present
Technical assistance and hands-on coaching for grantees of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Youth Engagement Innovation Fund. I support grantees to plan and implement innovative projects to increase youth engagement and leadership within their organizations.
Pathways for Girls
The American City Coalition
Consultant
2019
A Youth Participatory Action Research Project in Roxbury, MA, this project sought to understand opportunities and challenges of young women in Nubian Square, and to identify strategies to support their upward mobility. Pathways for Girls was a mixed methods, youth-led research project. We trained 6 young women as researchers and engaged 160 young women through surveys and focus groups. The project and its resulting report spurred action among several youth serving organizations to collaborate around girls empowerment.
Services: Participatory Action Research
Making Youth Voices Heard
Emmanuel Gospel Center
Consultant
2018
A Youth Participatory Action Research project to address rising violence in the Lower Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. This project equipped 11 youth to design and implement a research project to understand opinions and experiences of residents related to education, poverty, drugs, violence, and employment in their community. Youth researchers developed a set of recommended solutions, which they presented to the broader community. After being trained in the YPAR approach, this group continued their research the following year.
Services: Participatory Action Research
Program Design
Boston Project Ministries
Consultant
2017 - present
Career-readiness Curriculum: A six-week career-readiness curriculum, combining interactive activities and skill-building workshops to improve employability outcomes for summer youth employees. Implemented each summer for many years following its debut, this curriculum addressed workplace success, professional development, job-readiness, and career exploration.
Brotherhood & Sisterhood Programs: A leadership development and pre-employment summer program for middle school youth. I developed curricula, implementation plans, and tools to measure desired outcomes related to leadership and job-readiness.
Services: Strategic Planning & Program Design
Youth Hub Boston
Founder and Director
2014 - 2017
A neighborhood-based initiative supporting, equipping, and empowering youth as changemakers. Launched out of a community planning process with a vision to dramatically improve youth employment outcomes, Youth Hub applied youth participatory action research methods to understand complex issues related to youth success and to co-create solutions. Youth Hub engaged over 600 youth through youth-led research, career-readiness cohorts, workshops, job fairs, and more. As a result of this work, I was awarded a Neighborhood Hero award from ABCD, and was invited to speak at the 2015 URBAN Research-Based Action Network National Convention.
Youth Hub sparked many more organizations to apply participatory action research methods to empower youth and residents as leaders.
Services: Participatory Action Research, Strategic Planning & Program Design
