Giving Compass' Take:

• When funding youth initiatives, grantmakers should focus on the importance of youth relationships and proposals that suggest that those are the building blocks for positive youth development. 

• How can grantmakers encourage youth relationships across various programming and industries? 

• Learn about how to find out which youth development programs are the most effective. 

Too often both funders and practitioners fail to focus on the active ingredient in youth development: relationships.

We have identified five important aspects of developmental relationships: expressing care, challenging growth, providing support, sharing power, and expanding possibilities. Each element can be broken down into a set of discrete actions articulated in Search Institute’s new Developmental Relationships Framework.

Many factors keep schools and programs from adequately investing in relationships, from pressure to accomplish other objectives to the challenge of connecting across the lines of race, class, and culture. Another common obstacle is the way that some funders think about (or, perhaps more accurately, don’t think about) relationships.

This isn’t to say that relationships are the only thing that funders should consider when reviewing proposals in education and related fields. Relationships are necessary but not sufficient for youth success. Best practices, accountability, evidence-based interventions, collective impact, improvement science, and many other ingredients are also essential.

But we don’t need to wait for experimental evidence that those tools are effective to know that we can and should work to spark the active ingredient of developmental relationships. Funders (and practitioners) can begin to do that now by asking four main questions about grant proposals:

  1. Does the proposal explicitly include building relationships with and among young people as a strategy for achieving its objectives?

If the answer to the first question is no, then think hard about funding (or submitting) the proposal as written. If the answer is yes, then move on to the following three questions:

  1. Does the proposal identify who will build relationships with young people and when and how they will do it?
  2. Does the budget provide resources to support building relationships?
  3. Does the evaluation process include collection of data on relationships, and will it be possible to link that data to project outcomes?

Read the full article about youth relationships by Kent Pekel at Stanford Social Innovation Review