Opportunities and Resources
Opportunities:
Support young people to understand and articulate their core strengths and the connections of those strengths to core aspects of their identity.
Design in consultation with young people—giving their experience and feedback greater weight.
Seek to strike a balance between adult intervention and young people’s self-agency — their personal desire and ability to make change in their own lives.
Equip young people with the information, tools, relationships and resources to pursue their own paths to success.
Opportunities:
Invest in long-term equity strategies that build power and capacity among Black, Latino and other historically disenfranchised young people and communities.
Build teams that reflect the racial, ethnic and cultural identities of the populations you seek to serve.
Encourage holistic solutions and responses to the challenges young people of color face in navigating their career pathways. Work to disrupt and break down silos between organizations and institutions working to impact young people’s lives and career pathways.
Examine research, evaluation, and impact data through a racial equity lens. For example, ensure quantitative data is always disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
Opportunities:
Provide space for young people to articulate the needs and goals most important to them, map who they already know, and then help to foster additional relationships that meet their needs.
Help young people to develop a deep and wide network of adults and peers both within and outside of their immediate communities.
Acknowledge the influence that parents and families have on young people’s identities and how this foundation informs young people’s decisions about their lives and their futures.
Foster open spaces where young people can express themselves without the pressures of adult judgment and where they can learn from — and be inspired by—their peers.
Opportunities:
Expand institutional ideas and assumptions about what constitutes a good life and a good job.
Acknowledge and validate multiple career pathways, including both college and non-college pathways, those that are linear, and those that are more iterative and compounding.
Speak about and demonstrate failure, experimentation and exploration and demonstrate how these experiences positively influence occupational identity and help to refine career goals and aspirations.
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Now that you have taken this assessment and reviewed the resources we offer for each principle, we’d like to hear from you—is anything missing? Do you know of a program that is an exemplar in one or more Design Principles? What other opportunities would you add? Send an email to [email protected].