Youth Council

The Coalition for Youth Empowerment feels that it is vitally important to involve youth in its day to day processes and overall goals. For this purpose, the coalition intended to develop a ‘youth council’ in order to help our organizations further their understandings about youth by forming partnerships with them. On August 6th, the Coalition had a recruitment meeting at the Kansas City Public Library that was open to all interested youth. From that pool, a youth council comprised of 10 youth, ages 13 to 21, was created.

On August 23rd, our youth council participated in a "Program Evaluation Training" in which the council was trained on how to effectively evaluate the youth friendliness of youth organizations. The training was done by Kansas City’s Resource Development Institute (RDI) and was an 8 hour session. The youth council members were attentive and engaging throughout the training. The training was completed with the youth council taking a trip to the ‘College Basketball Experience’ at the Sprint Center to apply some of the skills they had learned. The youth had a great time and did a remarkable job of evaluating the ‘College Basketball Experience’ in terms of personnel (attitude and attire), physical surroundings, vendor
availability, gender and age representations, and so forth.

With the training completed, the next step for the youth council will be to evaluate youth organizations in the Coalition for Youth Empowerment. This will give our organizations a better understanding of how they are catering their services to the youth in which they serve or indirectly serve. Evaluations will be scheduled throughout the coming months.