Youth development training topics

Foundational, research-based face-to-face learning. Contact us to schedule one of these courses.

Communicating impact with financial stakeholders

This session will provide tools to help you explain program impact in compelling ways. Presenters will share tips for developing audience-focused content and grounding inspiring stories in evaluation data.

Core Components of Quality STEM

This training will improve the quality of your STEM [science, technology, engineering, math] programs, lessons and activities by helping you to identify, incorporate and facilitate the core components of science and engineering processes.

Culturally Responsive Youth Work Matters

Explore cultural identities and examine how they affect interactions with youth. Culturally responsive practice creates a sense of belonging and empowerment in young people.

Dilemmas in Youth Work

Youth workers face challenging situations they are required to address in their daily work with young people. Dig into the sticky challenges and issues of youth work and examine various ways to respond to real-life problems in your program.

Engaged learning

Participants explore how young people learn, what causes them to disengage from learning, and specific strategies for ensuring that the learning environment and the teaching itself is effective and engaging. 

Essential elements of cross-age teaching

Discover the benefits of having teens as teachers. Learn the essential elements needed to create an impactful learning environment for the teens, their younger peers and the adult liaison. 

Grow youth programs with middle management volunteers

Volunteers are critical to many youth-serving organizations. Middle-management volunteers direct other volunteers or assume primary responsibility for a specific part of a program. Learn how to cultivate volunteers to serve in these important roles.

Leadership Matters

Professional development strategies for youth work practice: Explore management and leadership in your program and gain internal professional development strategies targeted to youth work practice.

Leading teams: To team or not to team

Is it always better to work in teams? What gets in the way of productive teams? Working in teams can be beneficial, however may also have some drawbacks. Learn key elements to explore when launching and building effective teams.

Program planning

Different from lesson or event planning, program planning takes a big-picture look at the youth needs and assets of a community to make decisions about how a youth program can address those needs.

Reframing conflict

Shift to a positive youth development approach to behavior management. Learn both how to prevent many behavior issues and strategies for when things don't go as planned.

Sharing the stage: The youth and adult partnership dance

Explore best practices to unite youth leaders and their adult counterparts in shared leadership of events, committee work, and organizational operations. 

Social and emotional learning [SEL] suite

This training suite will help you design programs to support SEL, respond to unexpected opportunities that involve SEL and apply resources and activities from our SEL toolkit.

WeConnect

A program model and curriculum designed to show young people that they are participants in a global society and to prepare them to thrive in culturally diverse settings.

Youth as change agents

Discover how to develop and grow a youth leadership program through youth voice and shared power so youth leaders thrive. The program model is the Minnesota 4-H Ambassador program.

Youth Engagement Matters

Explore the Rings of Engagement model, a framework that outlines four types of youth engagement and youth-adult partnerships.

Youth equity learning series

In this series of stand-alone workshops, youth workers and young people learn how to address inequities at the programmatic, organizational and institutional levels. 

Youth Work Matters

Create resources and learn skills to help you work with young people. The content comes from a combination of real youth work experience and research-based material.

4-H Youth Teaching Youth

Understand the nuts and bolts of cross-age teaching best practices, research, and benefits, from identifying partners to teen recruitment and training.

Based on the literature, the Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs, a collaboration of 22 federal departments and agencies that support youth, has created the following definition of positive youth development [PYD]:

PYD is an intentional, prosocial approach that engages youth within their communities, schools, organizations, peer groups, and families in a manner that is productive and constructive; recognizes, utilizes, and enhances young people’s strengths; and promotes positive outcomes for young people by providing opportunities, fostering positive relationships, and furnishing the support needed to build on their leadership strengths.

The Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs developed a research agenda focused on positive youth development. Through a collaborative consensus-building process, representatives from federal agencies identified three research domains [conceptual issues, data sources and indicators, and program implementation and effectiveness] and key research questions that could benefit from future research.

PYD has its origins in the field of prevention. In the past, prevention efforts typically focused on single problems before they surfaced in youth, such as teen pregnancy, substance abuse, and juvenile delinquency.

Over time, practitioners, policymakers, funders, and researchers determined that promoting positive asset building and considering young people as resources were critical strategies. As a result, the youth development field began examining the role of resiliency — the protective factors in a young person's environment — and how these factors could influence one's ability to overcome adversity. Those factors included, but were not limited to, family support and monitoring; caring adults; positive peer groups; strong sense of self, self-esteem, and future aspirations; and engagement in school and community activities.

Researchers and practitioners began to report that young people who possess a diverse set of protective factors can, in fact, experience more positive outcomes. These findings encouraged the development of interventions and programs that reduce risks and strengthen protective factors. The programs and interventions are strengthened when they involve and engage youth as equal partners, ultimately providing benefits for both for the program and the involved youth.