Meaningful Engagement of Youth in Evaluation
Youth engagement can strengthen the quality and relevance of an evaluation, supporting both the capacity of young people and experienced evaluators.
By: Kathleen Baker, Partner, CogniProbe Solutions Inc.
Young people are the leaders of the next generation, they are active in many key challenges facing our world today. As important players in global social issues like climate change, poverty reduction and social justice; youth are on the front lines of advocating for change. When it comes to youth engagement in the evaluation of programs and services, however, there is more to be done to involve youth in meaningful ways that move beyond tokenistic participation. Having youth meaningfully involved in evaluation is a benefit because it can help generate new ideas, or solutions, and support more relevant programs and recommendations.
What does meaningful youth engagement mean?
To engage youth meaningfully in evaluation practice means that an evaluator makes an active effort to embed young people throughout the stages of an evaluation process; particularly within those programs or initiatives that impact them. Active effort implies participation beyond the process of collecting data points from youth, and moves into their involvement as partners, or co-developers. For example, youth engagement could involve bringing young people into the planning and design of an evaluation, its decision making, and having them lead segments of the evaluation itself. These roles could be characterized as youth acting as key informants or advisors, contributing to the evaluation by providing evidence, perspectives and insights; as co-evaluators where youth and senior evaluators are partnered together; or decision-makers, where youth co-lead the evaluation with the project oversight leads.
To effectively support youth engagement in a meaningful way may involve adjustments to existing behaviours and processes by experienced evaluators, both in formal stages and reflective practice. For example, it is essential to implement mechanisms that rebalance power relations and support power sharing, such as a youth steering committee, or other formalized spaces for youth to engage. These should be supported with dedicated resources and funding from the start of the evaluation. Another approach includes building in planning at the beginning of the evaluation to have inclusive approaches to reach different segments of youth, including diverse identities and cultures that are relevant for the evaluation, supported by a transparent process to recruit. Finally, evaluators should support both youth capacity, empowerment, and dedicated learning. This means experienced evaluators should create opportunities to support knowledge transfer regarding technical components of evaluation and build in mentoring and reflection time between senior and young evaluators to support their growth and development.
Engaging young people in evaluation can support both the capacity of the next generation of leaders and lead to more relevant programs that impact them. Meaningful youth engagement moves beyond simply seeing youth as a source of data, to instead recognizing their agency and value as partners, co-developers and decision makers. When working on programs and initiatives that impact youth, evaluators should strongly consider how they are designing and implementing their evaluation to meaningfully engage youth throughout the evaluation process.