What tools are available for continuous improvement?

Of course, youth and adults can’t achieve the positive outcomes unless the Y-AP is designed and implemented in a quality manner.  Fortunately, many 4H volunteers, practitioners and community leaders have learned, sometimes through trial and error, how to build quality into their youth-adult partnerships.  Researchers have studied this issue also.  There are some proven strategies and tool kits available to help you.  This session provides some of the most useful materials available to help you create quality Y-AP.

Planning Tools

• YAP-Savvy:What are the core ingredients for quality Y-AP? (Zeldin & Collura, 2010, pp. 11 to 16)
• YAP-Savvy: Why is Y-AP important to our organization? (Zeldin & Colllura, 2010, pp. 19 to 25)
• YAP-Savvy: Where should Y-AP occur within our organization? (Zeldin & Collura, 2010, pp. 27 to 33)

 

Assessment Tools

• Y-AP Assessment Tool designed for youth to quickly express their opinions about how youth and adults are working together. (Zeldin & Colleagues, 2014)
• Review the Youth and Adult Leaders for Program Excellence (YALPE) Assessment Instruments (assessing youth development and youth engagement):

1. YET (Youth Engagement Tool) assesses the degree to which youth have legitimate chances to be heard, respected and taken seriously during program design and implementation.
2. ORG YET (Organizational-Youth Engagement Tool) assesses the extent to which youth are involved in decision-making forums and the degree to which the organization creates structures to support youth engagement over the long term.

• Practical and Engaging Data Analysis Strategies (Bestul & Zeldin, 2012, pp. 30-32).
• A free assessment tool for professional development and program evaluation from the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative (CERC)  at Michigan State University, developed by Heng-Chieh Jamie Wu, Ph.D.  Save the pdf file for your own use/record before submitting to the collaborative.

Watch:
Youth and adults using data analysis (coming soon.)

After considering the readings and the videos:

What do you see as one of your most important opportunities?
How might these tools help you make the most of the opportunity?