Well-intentioned adults often develop plans to support youth. We identify what a youth needs, select an intervention, connect them with services, or design a plan to address challenging behavior.
But what happens when the plan doesn’t work?
We too often default to asking what’s wrong with the young person rather than interrogating the plan and its implementation. The young person wasn’t motivated. They didn’t engage. Their behavior was too challenging. Their family didn’t follow through. In other words: We built it, but they didn’t come.
What if we changed the default?
What if we engaged youth from the beginning to understand their needs and develop the plan itself?
And when the plan doesn’t work, what if we asked them why?
Episode 6 of the Thriving Youth Knowledge Exchange podcast explores this question with Rey Saldáña, Catherine Bradshaw, John Lochman, Eric Bruns and Kwesi Rollins — researchers and practitioners who each describe what it takes to actually ask, and to act on, what young people tell us.
[Related: The path blazed by Karl Dennis — “Father of Wraparound”]
Start with curiosity — and ask
Behavior does not explain itself.
In the segments “What Lies Beneath and Around Behavior,” and “Adapting What Works,” I speak with John Lochman, from the University of Alabama and co-developer of the Coping Power program, and Catherine Bradshaw, from the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development —who discuss why two youth can exhibit similar aggressive or disruptive behavior for very different reasons. Lochman’s research found some children do markedly better in one-on-one sessions than in group settings. It may be that they are physiologically slower to calm down once triggered, or, counterintuitively, they could be the most socially skilled kids, since they’re more susceptible to whatever their group reinforces, good or bad. That’s part of why the same intervention helps one youth and not another.
Bradshaw examines this same problem at a different level — not just the child, but the setting. “My particular interest has also been in adaptations for adolescents in high school settings,” she said, “which are a very different animal than you would see in an elementary school with a traditional pull-out.” Getting a program right, in her view, means looking past the curriculum itself to what she calls the “operating system” around it — training, coaching and data, “to make sure that we’re optimizing implementation.” Even a good program fails, she said, when a school treats adoption like a “shopping cart — ‘Oh, I’ll have a little bit of this, a little bit of that’” instead of following the sequence the model actually needs.
Youth have information about their own experience that no assessment or observation can supply.
Youth voice isn’t simply a matter of respect — it’s how we come to understand what’s happening and build a better response.
Relationships make honest answers possible
Asking is good, but youth have to be ready to answer.
In “The Adult Who Stays,” Rey Saldáña, president and CEO of Communities In Schools, told me about Mrs. Reyes, the CIS site coordinator who worked with him when he was a teenager in San Antonio’s South Side.
She stayed with him from his sophomore year through graduation. Time matters: “It wasn’t the first week or month or maybe even the first semester” before he trusted her enough to think, “This is somebody I can really trust and build a relationship with.” What built that trust wasn’t one conversation. It was her showing up year after year, asking the same kind of questions: “What do you want to do this year? How are you challenging yourself? What are you afraid of?”
Over time, that relationship enabled Mrs. Reyes to learn from Rey what he was experiencing.
Individualized support requires knowing youth; knowing youth requires relationships in which they can and will make themselves known.
Plan collaboratively
Courtesy of David Osher
David Osher, RCC
Eric Bruns — who co-directs the National Wraparound Initiative at the University of Washington — has spent decades studying what makes Wraparound actually work, not just sound good on paper. “If you don’t have the values being held close by your staff and your leadership and your supervisors, then all of the supportive and hospitable policies and settlement agreements at the state level and funding streams are only going to go so far.”
Bruns illustrated why with an exercise he uses in trainings: picture the worst crisis your family ever went through, then picture the person who got you through it. “Raise your hand if that was a professional, a therapist, social worker, a doctor” — few hands go up. “Raise your hand if that was someone connected to you by family, friends, or faith” — 90% of the room. Yet in his fidelity data on Wraparound programs, meaningfully engaging those natural supports consistently ranks lowest — only about one in five teams manages it. Hear more about what he’s learned in the segment “One Young Person, One Family, One Plan.”
Changing the plan shouldn’t mean adults retreating to a conference room to design Plan B alone. Youth and families should help develop Plan A and Plan B, help determine whether they’re working, and, when they’re not, help decide what comes next.
A plan is a hypothesis: Based on what we know together, this may help. Implementing plans produces new knowledge — some of which can come only from asking the youth: Did this help? If not, why? What should we try differently, and why?
Make youth voice consequential
Youth-serving organizations, particularly out-of-school-time programs, often embrace youth voice as a core value. In the segment “More Than a Place in the Room: Turning Participation into Influence and Shared Power,” Kwesi Rollins — interim president for the Institute for Educational Leadership — puts that claim to a test: “If you stop 10 superintendents on the street and ask them if they believe engaging families is good, almost all, 10 out of 10 will say yes.” But, he said, “when you examine their budgets, their structures, their who’s on their cabinet … you’ll find this huge gap between their espoused value” and what the organization does.
Creating a youth advisory council, inviting youth to a meeting, or conducting a survey doesn’t necessarily give youth meaningful influence over decisions that affect their lives. Rollins described sitting on a board with a young member who, for months, said nothing — until she finally admitted the jargon was going over her head. “It’s not enough just to have a parent on the board or a youth on the board,” he said. “They’ve got to be fully able to participate” — which means adults doing the extra work of making sure the conversation is accessible, not assuming a seat at the table is the same as a rightful voice in it.
That standard should extend to all plans adults build with individual youth.
Listening matters when what youth tell us can change our understanding, our plans and our actions.
In our conversation about community schools, Jane Quinn — who spent nearly two decades directing the National Center for Community Schools at Children’s Aid — puts the standard simply: “It isn’t just about listening. It is about authentic decision-making.” That’s why they have family members and young people on their school leadership teams.
As Quinn underscores, authentic decision-making means acting on requests adults wouldn’t have guessed themselves. She describes a community school director who let any group of 10 students who found a faculty advisor start a club — no adult sign-off on the idea itself required. One year, a group of boys asked to start a knitting club, after watching the girls’ club meet and clearly enjoy it. The staff funded it. “Knitting is a great way to relieve your stress,” the boys told her.
“What I love about this work,” Quinn said, “is that you never know.”
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The Thriving Youth Knowledge Exchange: Deeper Learning and Equity podcast series explores how to build the conditions for youth thriving more intentionally, in more places, for more young people. Previous pieces in the series can be read here:
A flashlight on the life spaces of young people | No youth thrives alone
Five shifts that would change everything | What John King’s teachers were actually doing
An invitation to learn, reflect and act together for equity-centered thriving
David Osher has been an organizer, professor, dean of an experimental college and schools of human services, researcher, and a TA provider and organizational consultant. His work focused on building humanizing conditions and capacities for and individual and collective thriving and equity.
