Youth Empowerment Model

Youth empowerment is an attractive strategy for a variety or reasons. In most communities, youth are a vast untapped resource in the effort to prevent the harm from underage drinking and other issues. Youth empowerment is also a “two-fer”. It promises impacts on two levels:

• The impact on the community that a group of youth might have as they participate in trying to reduce the harm of problems like underage drinking or tobacco use.

• The impact on the youth themselves as they attempt to impact their environment. Youth participating in these programs generally become informed, develop skills and become very committed to “practicing what they preach”.

Our Youth Empowerment Model has three core parts or steps:

Education/Information: Students are provided with the background information needed to develop an understanding of the problem. This provides the inspiration to act.

Skills: Youth are provided with the skills needed to take action and cause change. These include such things as media or speaking skills. This provides the skills to act.

Action: Youth are provided the opportunity to use the skills in the real world. They are given the chance to present to a classroom, hold a press conference, conduct a demonstration, or produce a video for cable access TV. This opportunity to take action and effect change is where the empowerment process is completed.

All three parts are critical to achieve true youth empowerment, and preferably in the order described above. Consider a situation where youth are asked to pass out palm cards about underage drinking to pedestrians at a public awareness event being planned by an adult coalition. If the students have not been given the background info and a real understanding of the issues involved, their participation may be “helpful” to the adults, but they are not empowered.

In the previous example, the adults may take credit for “youth participation”, but in reality the youth were just performing a mechanical task for the adults. When youth are involved in prevention activities and do not understand the issues, problems and consequences involved - they are not learning to assess problems and consider solutions.

When youth are involved in action projects where they are not provided the appropriate skills, they have missed an opportunity to learn and are likely to be ineffective. There is a correct way and an incorrect way to teach a class, write a press release or create a radio PSA. Youth who get in front of an audience and speak or perform poorly are just as ineffective as adults who are unprepared.

This toolkit is specifically designed to assist the user in moving the youth they work with through the three core steps in the process of youth empowerment: