Years ago, I was running a youth-adult partnership model in Portland, Oregon, matching young people with local elected officials. For two years, a county commissioner had worked with a young woman who could engage with policy at a near-adult level. It was easy. Then that young woman left for college. We matched the commissioner with a new participant who was younger and from another district. After one meeting, the commissioner’s office called: she wanted a different young person. This one didn’t engage the way the previous one had.
I told her, “This is a developmental program. The expectation is that you, as the adult, adapt.” We got into a real argument. In her mind, it wasn’t her job to change.
That moment crystallized something I’ve carried into every conversation since.
Most adults enter relationships with young people expecting the young person to adapt to them. When we reverse that expectation, we are asking for something the field talks about but rarely demands.
Where the field stopped
Positive youth development (PYD) has come a long way since the 1990s, when scholars like Peter Benson and colleagues at the Search Institute shifted the field from seeing young people as problems to recognizing them as assets. Ginwright and Cammarota argued that youth should be agents of change. Zeldin, Christens and Powers established reciprocity and shared power as foundational. Freire named the deeper problem: when one party holds all the knowledge, and the other is expected to receive it, the relationship becomes a transaction dressed as development.
The scholarship exists. The frameworks exist. Over time, I’ve come to believe that PYD practiced at depth rests on six premises:
(1) We are strength-based, not deficit-based.
(2) Relationships are key.
(3) Youth are valued as active partners, not passive recipients.
(4) Development requires adult, organizational, and community change.
(5) We democratize the work.
(6) Our engagement is culturally responsive and sustaining.
These premises only hold when they are practiced together. Any can be espoused and still upheld thinly. The gap is not about which premises the field has adopted. It is about the depth at which any of them are practiced and the conditions required to practice them well.
Why this matters now
The youth development workforce is in crisis. Organizations face chronic vacancies, high turnover and burnout across all levels. Developmental relationships require continuity, and many organizations are unable to create the conditions that allow adults to remain, deepen and grow.
The field spent three decades rethinking the role of young people in the work.
It has barely begun to rethink the role of the adults who do it.
When adults are unsupported and burning out, young people absorb it. Not always visibly, but over time, a check-in gets replaced by a curriculum module. A caseload doubles after a resignation that takes months to fill. Young people learn to read the environment for what it is rather than what it says it is. They adjust their expectations accordingly — of the program, of the relationship, and sometimes of what they believe they deserve from the adults in their lives.
What it looks like when adults develop
Courtesy of Marc Fernandes
Marc Fernandes
Early in my career, I worked in a long-term program in the Bronx with sixty young people. On my first day, a young man told me his life story within minutes. We connected immediately. Then there was a young woman who would not speak to me. Would not come to my sessions. I had a choice. I could enforce participation or I could let her set the terms and let time be part of the dynamic between us. I chose to wait. I said hello every time I saw her. Never pushed, never penalized. Three years went by. Then one day, she said hello. We built a relationship that lasted well beyond the program.
[Related: On developmental relationships]
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: she wasn’t just the recipient of my patience. She was the source of it. Before her, I had never had to stay present with someone who held that much distance for that long. She required me to build a capacity I didn’t yet have. That didn’t come from training. It came from her.
That’s what mutual development means. Not just that adults are obligated to grow but that young people are a source of that growth. They bring something to the relationship that adults cannot develop on their own. When we name that, the power dynamic shifts. Young people are not just partners who deserve a seat at the table; they carry the expertise adults need.
From individual to organization
One adult learning that lesson, no matter how deeply, is not enough. If the organization doesn’t reinforce it, if supervision doesn’t support it, if the culture doesn’t model it, even the most developed adult is practicing in isolation.
What shifts an organization is when individual development becomes peer influence and peer influence becomes culture.
If we want these six premises to be more than stated commitments, we have to build organizations that make them real in practice. Where adults are expected to grow, where the conditions exist for that growth to take root, and where young people encounter, every day, adults who are still becoming.
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Marc Fernandes is senior director of programs at Youth INC, a New York City nonprofit that builds the capacity of youth-serving organizations. With over 25 years of experience in youth development and community engagement, Marc is a leading voice on positive youth development, supporting nonprofits in adopting research-based evaluation strategies and understanding social-emotional learning outcomes through an anti-racist and culturally sustaining lens. He holds a master of science in urban policy and leadership from Hunter College.
