YALPE Workbook

Youth and Adult Leaders for Program Excellence:  A Practical Guide for Program Assessment and Action Planning.

The Youth and Adult Leaders for Program Excellence is a resource kit designed to help youth-serving organizations enhance the quality of their programs.  It is provided here in its entirety for your use.

Specifically, the resource kit is designed to:

  • Strengthen the quality of youth-adult partnerships and youth voice in program decision-making and
  • Strengthen the quality of developmental opportunities, relationships, and emotional supports offered to program participants.

The resource kit is designed to allow organizations to choose their own assessment.  The assessment tools included in the resource kit focus on:

  • the extent to which youth are involved in the design and implementation of programming,
  • the extent to which youth have a voice in organizational governance, and
  • the provision of developmental opportunities and supports in program activities.

There are FOUR assessment tools in Youth and Adult leaders for Program Excellence:

  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.
  3. PAAT (Program Assessment and Activity Tool) assesses the developmental opportunities and supports that are provided to youth in the program.
  4. kidPAAT (Program Assessment and Activity Tool – for younger participants) assesses similar opportunities and supports as PAAT, but in a more simplified format. This is recommended for children under the age of 12.

More details about these tools are on pages 9 and 10 of the guide.  The script and form for each tool are in the corresponding appendices.  Appendix 1 for YET, Appendix 2 for the ORG YET and similarly Appendix 3 and 4 have the script for the PAAT and kidPAAT.  The appendices provide a worksheet for hand calculating or you can use these excel workbooks:

Creating a Report

Appendix 5 provides a Report Template which you can easily edit.