"For us, by us"

young people's leadership, participation, and agency in a youth led project for community development

Edición de la obra "For us, by us"

This study is an in-depth, qualitative examination of leadership, participation and agency that a team of eight working-class young people develop and exercise in the context of a youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) project, located in their urban neighborhood. This YPAR project was supported by two adult facilitators and indirectly supported by five adults affiliated with the project. Research on positive youth development strategies has not closely investigated the benefits and limitations of specific strategies to support youth leadership, participation and agency in community development efforts. Positive Youth Development (PYD), Critical Youth Studies and Youth-led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) literatures view young people as community assets and resources. However, these literatures have paid little attention to how young people perceive their participation as decision-makers and leaders or to youth perspectives on effective strategies to develop youth leadership. This study investigates youth participation as leaders and decision-makers to examine strategies in one YPAR project that foster, or inhibit, youth participation in decision-making and leadership. This study also examines the ways in which young people understand their participation as decision-makers and leaders in these strategies in relation to their project context. This study revealed four major findings. First, young people were highly engaged in what I refer to as a pedagogy of praxis, in which young people build their theories about the nature of the community needs they aim to address and then engage in directing a research-based action plan to meet these needs. Second, youth researchers engaged their sociopolitical analysis development skills, in which they built their critical thinking skills by connecting their personal, micro-level experiences of sociopolitical inequities to larger, macro-level sociopolitical forces. Third, youth leadership development has a strong relational component that centers sharing ideas through a collaborative process to make project decisions, which I term, relational leadership. Fourth, adults support youth-led projects through sharing power with young people, which entails a reflective approach in which adults intervene in the group process to support their goals to build their leadership capacities.