Does how we talk about youth outcomes matter?

In a word, YES! But it’s so much more than just knowing the outcomes youth have after being a part of your program. We need to be able to talk about youth outcomes in broad strokes if we hope to achieve long-term, far-reaching systemic change in the lives of youth we serve. For many years, there has been a push for nonprofits to know their outcomes, create their logic models, identify the outputs and outcomes, and be able to track those over a period of time. The youth service field is making progress in this area, but there is more to be done. We still need to identify better ways to track outcomes, and more nuanced approaches to understanding the connections between the activities and services we offer to youth and the corresponding outputs and outcomes. Within each of our fields, whether we primarily provide mentoring, employment and education services, or youth homelessness programs, for example, there are youth service professionals and researchers who are leading the way in better understanding the youth we serve, the impact of services in both the short and long term, and the overall outcomes that with some coordination, can be translated to a national understanding of what works with young people experiencing risk factors. During MANY’s Connection 2014 event, Washington DC insider and nonprofit expert Gordon MacDougall spoke about the growth of Pay for Success models and how they are shaping the way we measure and discuss outcomes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5fcjbWgQg While he spoke in the context of Pay for Success, the lessons and applications can be applied to how we look at youth outcomes and developing our extended evidence-base for youth programming. At the core of his talk is that the federal government (and an increasing number of private funders) is growing more agnostic about how you achieve your metrics. Rather, they are interested in the fact that your metrics are tested and measured along the way. This gives us freedom in designing programs that are tailored to the unique needs of the youth we serve; however, it also makes it all the more critical that we find a common ground to talk about our impact. If we are all serving youth with a different approach (sometimes even the same youth with several different approaches), how can we speak to positive changes and improvements within that youth? Does progress and achievement look the same for a teen who doesn’t have stable housing as it does for a teen with a history of involvement with the juvenile justice system? In 2012, the Forum for Youth Investment with the National Collaboration for Youth Research Group produced a document that makes an argument and a path forward toward a common set of outcomes and indicators for youth. Their report contends that all youth outcomes can be divided into three domains: healthy and safe, connected, and productive. Much like MacDougall’s talk, there is a notion that we don’t have to take the same approach to developing healthy and safe, connected, and productive youth, but the more we can use the same verbiage for our outcomes, the more united our voice. So as you develop your next logic model or approach the next program evaluation, take a moment to explore the greater context with which you serve youth. How does the language you use to talk about outcomes impact the youths’ perception of themselves, the communities’ perception of the youth, and our overall ability to communicate strong outcomes for the youth we all serve? Explore programs that may have similar logic models or look at current research and evaluation projects. Whenever possible, look for opportunities to build upon the existing language and terminology. Then, as we all grow our individual evidence base, we are also growing a national basis for our work and its impact. --Katy White, Director of Research and Innovation, MANY