About the Project
What is the Young Decision Makers Youth Group?
YDM Toronto provides youth with a safe, open space to get together once a week and discuss issues that are affecting youth in our country. In this program, young people will study and discuss these topics, including health and healthy relationships, and create plans of action to help improve these social issues for young people across Canada. The group will provide advice to several government departments and will be invited to present their results at a national youth conference in March. It's a great opportunity for volunteer hours, resume building and having your voice heard by senior decision-makers. The group will run from November 25-June 2016.
How will the youth group share what they learn?
Young Decision Makers will create informative content through multimedia deliverables to better educate other youth on various aspects of healthy lifestyle choices and inform policy makers about the policies that affect them. These healthy lifestyle choices include: Tobacco Cessation, Healthy Relationships, Violence Prevention, and Drug and Substance Abuse Awareness. These multimedia deliverables will be spread across the city of Toronto and various social media platforms to promote awareness in other Toronto youth. To spread these materials, they will be printed and posted accross the city, as well as posted on twitter and facebook for wider exposer.
What is the duration of the project?
The youth group will be meeting weekly starting in November and continuing until June. The materials the youth create will then be used for a final showcase delivered by the youth group at the end of the project as well as used to support the delivery of other workshops delivered by The Students Commission moving forward. The youth group will also work towards the Young Decision Makers Conference and will support the process through: planning the event, multimedia deliverable creation, and facilitating the conference.
Throughout the delivery of YDM, the youth group will also be posting updates on twitter and facebook about upcoming events, meetings and other physical gatherings to address a larger audience and have a larger impact on the communities that the youth participate in.
How will the successes of the group be measured?
The impact of the program will be measured using the Sharing the Stories platform to assess, on a bi-weekly timeframe, whether the youth within project feel the project is achieving the desired results or how to better guide the proceeding weeks of the program. As well as analyzing the youth's opinions, we will target key statistics such as how many users interact with the YDM web content, as well as how many interactions each user has with the content and the amount of time they spend with each deliverable.
Youth Engagement Framework
The Youth Engagement Framework from the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement. PDF version
The Centre’s Youth Engagement Framework provides a way to conceptualize youth-adult partnerships, youth engagement contexts and outcomes. The framework is designed to take into account the three levels in which engagement and outcomes happen: 1) Individual, 2) Social, and 3) Systems. These levels are illustrated by the three layers in each bubble. This framework highlights the importance of youth-adult partnerships as initiators and sustainers of youth engagement that are associated with positive outcomes for youth and adults at the individual and social levels, as well as for the organization and community. Further, the framework also illustrates the importance of the context of youth-adult partnership activities (in the central hexagon) for these outcomes. With this framework in mind, we can question whether youth-adult partnerships are different in different contexts, and whether they have different outcomes.
