Collaborating with Youth Organizing Groups and Networks

The Research Hub collaborates closely with youth organizing groups and network and provides relevant and timely research to help them deepen and advance their work. 

This area of work launched in September 2016. Graduate student Tafadzwa Tivaringe and Research Associate Siomara Valladares joined co-Principal Investigator Ben Kirshner in exploring the current context of youth community organizing through January 2017.

"As a research team, we specifically sought to identify the issues that youth organizing groups were working on, as well as exploring exactly how our research support could be useful to the field of youth organizing," Valladares explains.  

All together, we reached out to 17 different groups/networks.  We carried out a total of 12 interviews - 3 interviews with funding agencies, 5 interviews with organizing groups/networks, and 4 interviews with researchers/consultants.  From these 12 interviews, we identified school discipline/school-to-prison pipeline, the implementation of restorative practices, and the privatization of schools as priority issues for youth organizing groups. We also learned that there is a need for research translation, greater access to YPAR, data analysis, and accessible survey tools.

With this information, we began initiating relationships with potential youth organizing partners.  

As of May 2017, we have initiated several new partnerships with youth organizing groups and networks. You can learn more about our partners and our collaborative work with them on our Partners Page.