Youth Friendly Communities - Part I
A Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project to develop and refine a youth-driven environmental assessment toolkit for the evaluation of outdoor community spaces by and for young people. The project also aimed to study whether young people participation in community assessment and planning projects contributes to their positive development.
2020-2024
What are we trying to do or learn?
This study aimed to development an environmental audit tool as well as a youth-friendly communities workshop program to help youth themselves evaluate whether the outdoor public spaces in their communities are youth-friendly. The tool is the first environmental audit tool developed with youth where youth also serve as the auditors. Development of this tool and associated workshop program was the first phase of an initiative to help youth identify and advocate for more youth-friendly spaces and features in their communities.
Where and with whom?
Workshops were conducted with 6 cohorts of youth from across New York State. Youth ranged in age from 8 to 20 years, with a median age of ~14 years.
Approach & Methods Used
Workshops, ranging from 2- 5 days, engaged youth in the assessment of community parks using a draft audit tool to both identify issues and features that are important to youth and to help them identify changes they would like to see in their communities. Diverse activities, including arts-based methodologies and design visioning exercises, were utilized to help youth participants identify assets and challenges in their existing community outdoor spaces and articulate changes they would like to see to better support the needs and preferences of youth. Surveys of youth also evaluated the appeal and value of the workshop activities, the relevance and importance of audit items, as well as impacts of the YPAR process on positive youth development outcomes. Note: significant portions of this project were carried out through a lab-funded PhD dissertation (Jaffe).
Findings & Publications
Jaffe, J.* & Loebach, J. (2023). Fostering youth-enabling environments: A participatory affordance capability framework for the development and use of youth-engaged environmental assessments. Youth & Society, 56(1), 164-192.
Jaffe, J.* & Loebach, J. (in preparation). Development of a Youth-Assessed Environmental Audit Tool to Evaluate whether Community Outdoor Spaces are Youth-Enabling.
Additional papers forthcoming