Positive Youth Development in Humane Education Programs

By: Heather Franco

Humane Education Manager, East Bay SPCA

Humane educators come from different career paths and often wear many hats in their organizations. You may be a humane educator who is coming into the role with more animal care or community engagement experience than youth development and it can be overwhelming knowing where to start your professional growth. Read on to learn about the basics of youth development and how to incorporate them into your humane education programming to have the greatest outcomes for your participants. 

What is Positive Youth Development?

Youth development is an umbrella term that covers how youth and adolescents grow and interact with the world around them. It is linked to the intersection of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model Theory, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and Garbarino’s work explaining “social toxicity” and their effects on youth and adolescents, among other social and psychological theories. Positive youth development is the committed and concerted effort of those who work with youth and adolescents to partner with participants to navigate the world and develop to their full potential. 

An excellent resource that will be referenced several times here is Positive Youth Development 101 by Jutta Dotterweich (Cornell University, and several collaborators). It is a curriculum used to train youth work professionals and is full of theory, references, history, and actual training exercises to bring to your team. 

From the curriculum, positive youth development focuses on five research-based principles:

• Focus on positive outcomes: We shift from preventing or fixing problems to creating positive outcomes such as competencies, connections and caring relationships, positive values and expectations, and meaningful participation. This also means we use a strengths-based approach. 

• Youth voice/engagement: We work with young people, not for them. We engage young people as partners, create youth-adult partnerships, and listen to their expertise and perspective. This usually requires that we as adults become aware of and control the negative assumptions and stereotypes we might have of young people (“adultism”).

• Long-term, developmentally appropriate involvement: As a community we seek to support young people throughout their development- about 20 years -while adjusting to their changing developmental needs. A 12-year-old needs different support and opportunities than a 16-year-old. We also know that young people need extended exposure to programs and supportive adults to thrive; short-term programs and opportunities are not as effective. 

• Universal/inclusive: As a community we need to provide support and opportunities to all young people, not just to the “high risk,” targeted groups or the high achieving groups. This does not mean, however, that we cannot provide additional support to young people who face extra challenges. In addition, research tells us that universal strategies are often very effective for high need youth. 

• Community-based/collaborative: Young people interact with a variety of social environments. For a positive youth development approach to succeed, non-traditional community sectors such as businesses, faith communities, or civic organizations need to be involved. And this implies that we have to work together collaboratively. 

Dotterweich also challenges those who work with youth and adolescents to make a paradigm shift. 

From	To
Fixing problems	Building on strengths
Reactive	Proactive
Troubled youth	All youth
Youth as recipients of services	Youth as participants/resources
Programs	Relationships
Professional work	Everyone’s work

This table is adapted from Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships Framework and 40 Developmental Assets; both excellent resources when learning about positive youth development.  

How Does this Relate to Humane Education Programming?

Humane Education means different things to different practitioners, so naturally positive youth development will vary across settings. It’s likely only some of these principles and techniques will directly apply to the work you’re doing, and that’s okay! With limited resources (especially time), it’s important to hone in on what will benefit your organization and community most. 

Begin by evaluating your current situation and then identify areas for growth that make sense for your organization, department, team, and programmatic goals and values. Start with an evaluation specifically designed for youth development programs, like The Forum for Youth Investment’s David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality. They offer free Program Quality Assessments (PQAs) that measure programs serving youth in grades K-6, grades 4-12, and programs focusing on Social & Emotional Learning (SEL). While these tools were created with school-year long afterschool programs in mind, they have also created a Summer Camp PQA and can be adapted to suit your program’s specific needs. All you have to do is utilize the pieces that make sense and exclude the pieces that don’t. 

After evaluating the current situation, work with your team to identify areas of growth you’d like to focus on. You can use strategic plans, mission statements, values, etc. that are in place and already guide the work you do to narrow this focus. For example, it may not be feasible for your Humane Education team to provide a long-term program by facilitating a school-year-long afterschool program, so you may choose instead to focus on growing the youth voice in your existing programs. There is professional development to build skills or resources such as Afterschool Alliance’s Youth Voice Toolkit to study and discuss with your colleagues. 

Ultimately, continuous improvement shouldn’t be so daunting, as that mindset prevents you from doing what you can to grow and evolve your programming. Seek out support from your peers (have you connected with APHE’s Groupsite yet?) and have fun developing your skills along with the positive development of your participants!

President’s Pen: May 2024

By: Melissa Logan

Director of Education, Alberta SPCA

Hello APHE!

Welcome to our new feature! We are replacing our Humane Education Quarterly newsletter (HEQ) with a blog - EmpowerEd by APHE. This blog will still feature some familiar content including featured lessons, book reviews, and research in the field, however we are increasing the frequency and expanding the scope of our content. As always, we encourage members to submit articles to share knowledge and perspective.

I’m thrilled to share with you some of the work your APHE Board of Directors has been doing over the past year and what’s coming up on the horizon.

APHE is dedicated to empowering YOU - to promote empathy through education. Here’s a brief look at what we’ve done this past year to support you and our community of humane educators towards this mission. 

We’ve launched a partner page! Featuring members’ and supporters’ organizations, we are highlighting groups that are innovating, inspiring and providing humane education. Is your organization featured? If not, fill out this form to join the many organizations who support our mission, vision and work.  

We also had our greatest engagement with our Educator’s Choice awards this year! These awards help to highlight the incredible work people are doing to make a positive difference in their communities for animals, people and the environment. We will be launching these awards again in February 2025, so watch for the nominations!  

We also recently hosted our annual national conference in Buffalo, NY to provide our members with valuable in-person networking and professional development. The theme of this conference was Unleashing Compassion: Exploring Empathy in Erie County and I’m heartened at how fully this conference embodied the theme. It is all thanks to the presenters, attendees, sponsors (with great appreciation to our Visionary Level sponsor, Maddie's Fund), exhibitors, and the incredibly friendly and welcoming people in Buffalo that we worked with to host our conference. 

Attendees at the 2024 APHE National Conference #ThanksToMaddie

Here’s just one example of the kindness and empathy that was showcased at our awards dinner. Every year at the awards dinner (previously the Auction), we play a game called Heads or Tails. I’ve heard from long-time APHE members that this game can be quite competitive. For this game, folks buy beads in advance with funds raised supporting our Nathania Gartman Memorial Scholarship Fund. Predictions are made, coins are flipped, and wrong guesses means you lose beads. When we were down to two competitors, instead of the nails coming out, we all witnessed kindness and generosity with both competitors sharing beads back and forth until it was a tie at the end. Instead of a tie breaker, the audience demanded that both of the finalists be winners, and how could we argue? (My heart also grew three sizes that evening). We hope both of these incredibly kind and compassionate educators join us next year in Kansas City (as they both won a free conference registration!). We will soon be putting out a call for speakers for the 2025 conference, so stay tuned! 

Final heads and tails competitors cheering for one another (APHE awards dinner) 

Finally, the board invested time into surveying our membership and developing a three year strategic plan to expand our reach, improve the quality and access to resources and professional development, and foster an inclusive and diverse community. I’d love to hear what you think! Let me know if you have any questions, comments or just reach out and say hi. My email is president@aphe.org. 

I hope to see you all on Groupsite or at the next Coffee & Connect. Have a great summer and best of luck for those hosting camp over the next few months!

Best, 

Melissa