Friday, June 24, 2011

Workshop: D7 - North Carolina's Youth Advocacy Toolkit

This workshop will be held on Tuesday, June 28th from 8:00am to 10:45am in Ballroom H.

Friends, Advocates, Countrymen and women, lend me your ears! No seriously, check it out!

This year, the NC State Association teamed up with Youth Empowered Solutions (YES!) to collaborate on a really unique workshop aimed to help adult and youth leaders alike. It's no secret that engaging youth in school-based health care advocacy work is a major key to success for any local center or even state association, but what does it even mean to engage youth in this work we are so passionate about?



Our session is going to map out the Youth Empowerment Model (The Model) as an evidence-based methodology for engaging youth in creating community change around access to care issues. In North Carolina, the Model is being applied within both statewide and local communities...because let's be honest... you can't simply bring people to the table and expect miracles to happen. You have to create infrastructure, you have to provide a deeper understanding of the issues you are addressing and you have to rethink how you are defining success. Also, you have to have FUN! In Chicago, we are going to unveil our new YES! Youth Engagement Toolkit that is going to help you do just that (mostly have fun).



The adults will explore the value of The Model as, not just, a philosophy, but also an outcomes plan and an organizational infrastructure. Adults will leave with resources to help them facilitate an Access to Care training with TONS of fun and interactive games as well as an evaluation tool that adults can tailor and use to measure impact.

The youth will dig deep down into the field of school-based health care and explore "access to care" as a social justice issue to have a deeper comprehension of the issues they are advocating for as well as get some ideas for some new online and offline advocacy campaigns. All activities done will also be facilitated in a train-the trainer method so that youth participants will leave with the ability and know how to use them within their own community.

As well, we will talk briefly about a brand new organizational assessment tool called the YES! Appraisal. The Appraisal is a tool to help your organization understand its own capacity to engage in youth empowerment as well as create tangible and clear stepping stones for how to more deeply involve youth within the organizational structure.

Parrish Ravelli
Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES!)


***Following the session, the participants will receive an electronic version of the NC Youth Engagement Toolkit to begin using to create community change in their local community! Copies can be requested by emailing Parrish@youthempoweredsolutions.org***

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