Facilitate Together
Young adults and adult system partners co-facilitating a training is an opportunity to model EYE’s philosophies and practices in real time. It’s also an excellent opportunity for young people to develop leadership skills.
Elevating Youth Engagement is a free training series developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in partnership with Cetera Inc.
The curriculum provides practical, step-by-step lessons for child welfare professionals and young people with foster care experience to learn how to collaborate effectively. It’s designed for organizations that want to move from understanding why youth engagement matters to knowing how to make it real through shared decision making, co-leadership and authentic partnership.
Many child welfare leaders value youth engagement but haven’t been trained to prepare for or sustain youth–adult collaboration. This curriculum fills that gap — offering tested exercises and real-world examples of teamwork such as:
Developed and tested by young leaders with foster care experience, the curriculum reflects more than two decades of the Casey Foundation’s national leadership in authentic youth engagement — an approach that values young people’s expertise as essential to improving systems and outcomes.
Authentic youth engagement is grounded in the belief that young people’s voices lead to better policies and practices. Research on adolescent brain development shows that when young people are trusted to lead and make decisions, they gain confidence, autonomy and skills for adulthood.
Since 2001, the Foundation's Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative® with its 16 network sites have helped achieve more than 390 policy and practice improvements for young people transitioning from foster care — with youth helping drive 87% of the wins recorded in 2024.
The Elevating Youth Engagement curriculum includes:
It can be used as a full training series or tailored to meet the needs of specific audiences.
This training is ideal for:
Most important, young people gain tools to use their voices, advocate for their needs and influence the systems shaping their lives — while building skills for leadership and civic participation.
Authentic youth engagement means positioning young people not as tokens or symbols but as full design partners whose insights shape policies, programs and services that truly meet their needs. When youth with foster care experience have real opportunities to lead and make decisions, they thrive personally and professionally and build essential autonomy.
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