Alex Lohrbach leads the youth engagement portfolio within the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family Well-Being Strategy Group. In this role, she supports child welfare agencies and other organizations supporting youth who have been in foster care in developing youth-adult partnership strategies, tools and resources. I had the opportunity to talk with Lohrbach about the recent release of the Elevating Youth Engagement curriculum, which was codeveloped by youth engagement experts Cetera, Inc. Designed for both young leaders and adult supporters, the curriculum offers clear, actionable instruction for building effective, authentic partnerships with young people who have experienced foster care.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell me a little bit about the EYE curriculum. What gaps was it trying to fill? What is it designed to support people in doing?
Alex Lohrbach: Our approach to authentic youth engagement has been really developed and tested over the past 24 years by the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative (Jim Casey Initiative). The Jim Casey Initiative works to ensure that young people who spent at least one day in foster care after their 14th birthday have access to relationships, resources and opportunities. The approach is grounded in adolescent brain science, which shows that young people who have experienced foster care thrive when they are provided opportunities to lead and make decisions that affect their own lives.
Courtesy of Alex Lohrbach
Alex Lohrbach
Since 2001, Jim Casey network sites have helped influence more than 390 child welfare policy and practice changes. In 2024, young people contributed to 87% of the policy and practice wins.
That’s the context EYE was born out of. The EYE curriculum captures this tested approach to authentic youth engagement, which centers a belief that child welfare policies and practices are better when they are informed by young people who have experienced the system and know what is needed for youth to thrive.
EYE is designed to equip adult partners and young leaders with the skills to work together and create change in the child welfare systems. EYE provides practical tools to do that work in a really authentic way that is mutually beneficial.
The curriculum has three tracks, one for adult supporters, one for young people and one for adult supporters and young people to experience together. There are eight modules across those three tracks. They’re designed to be pulled off the shelf and used by anybody, so each module includes materials and tangible tools so people can really access the skills needed to do this work together.
We believe this curriculum can really accelerate positive outcomes, and we have seen this in a number of states with completely different child welfare contexts.
Q: There is a strong focus on well-being for young leaders in the curriculum. How did that come about and why is it so important?
Alex Lohrbach: Young people really recommended the curriculum focus on wellness for young leaders who engage in advocacy. We heard loud and clear that doing advocacy work and really centering one’s own lived experiences is heavy work. It’s emotionally taxing work. Young people really elevated the need for tangible tools and strategies to support their own wellness and well-being as they move through their advocacy journey. The curriculum provides practical skill-building tips on managing stress, engaging in self-reflection and exercising boundary setting.
[Related: Never too young to be an advocate]
I think it’s something that is really important for adult supporters to also be focused on — in terms of how important it really is when we’re talking about equipping young people with skills to do this work and to also just navigate their lives in general. Prioritizing one’s wellness is crucial, and it is a transferable, life-long skill.
Q: What does that mean and look like for youth-adult partnerships to be mutually beneficial, particularly when working with foster youth?
Alex Lohrbach: Mutually beneficial engagement means focusing not only on what the young person can provide but also on what adult supporters can provide the young person. It’s important that the ways in which we engage young people are linked to personal and professional goals and aspirations that are identified by the young person. This ensures young people can gain access to information, develop leadership skills and shape decisions that affect them and their peers. We know that while in foster care, young people often have a lot of decisions made for them and not with them. When young people feel connected to people they trust and have the information and autonomy to make decisions that impact their lives, they experience a sense of self-determination, which is linked to resilience and overall well-being.
[Related: From relationships to opportunities — What we learned about social capital mobilization]
On the other hand, when system leaders, youth-serving organizations and others invest in youth engagement, they become better informed about issues facing the young people they serve and, together, can design policies and practices that are more likely to meet the needs of all young people, especially those with the greatest need.
Q: Let’s stick with that theme of decision making. The Title IV-B reauthorization now requires states to include young people in decision making. What do you really think agencies should be prioritizing first as they consider meeting that requirement?
Alex Lohrbach: Based on the work of the Jim Casey Initiative over the past 24 years, we know that authentic youth-adult partnerships take time and intention. Many system leaders and decision-makers understand the importance of youth engagement but have never been trained on how to prepare for, plan and apply a youth-adult partnership approach to the work. The EYE curriculum helps equip people with the information and skills to do so.
[Related: From curiosity to action: Learn to engage youth in YPAR]
One tool presented in the EYE curriculum is the Spectrum of Youth Participation — a tool that helps organizations identify how they may already be engaging young people in community or systems change efforts. It also helps identify what level or kind of youth engagement is best for their work. The EYE curriculum emphasizes practices that shift away from engaging young people in ways that tokenize or offer only surface-level opportunities to create change and move toward meaningful participation.
Q: What impact do you hope the EYE curriculum will have on individual organizations and on the broader youth-serving field as they work with young people who have experienced foster care?
Alex Lohrbach: My hope is that people pick it up and feel like they really are equipped to use it — that they’re equipped with the skills to strengthen their youth engagement work. For folks who are just starting on their youth engagement journey — who think it’s a good idea and are bought into the idea and the philosophy — but don’t really know where to start, I hope they now have a tool that can help support them in that journey. Equally, for other organizations and groups that may already have youth engagement strategies in place, this can be something that strengthens them, so that they’re doing this work in a really authentic way. Ultimately, I hope it leads to young people feeling empowered and supported to be involved in these system change efforts and that the partnerships themselves actually yield better policies and practices because they’ve been designed in partnership with people who have experienced those systems.
