Using Ethnographic Research to Enhance Youth Program Planning

With the help of the Independence Community Foundation, the Red Hook Community Justice Center, a community court that aims to improve public safety in a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood, sought to tackle the problem of the positive perceptions of youth crime among young people residing in public housing. The Red Hook Houses—the largest public housing development in Brooklyn—are home to a sizeable population of disconnected youth. Many of these young people—predominantly male, poor, and black and Latino—are involved in the neighborhood’s drug trade. The Justice Center wanted to design a program that would provide young popular opinion leaders with the analytical skills and marketing techniques to create and disseminate a youth-designed and -driven community education campaign to challenge the positive perceptions of youth crime.

As it was initially conceived, the first step of this program—drawn from public health safe-sex models—involved using ethnographic research methods to identify young popular opinion leaders in the community so they could be recruited for program participation. As an experienced youth ethnographer and youth program designer, I was hired to oversee the process. After some consideration, my colleagues and I decided to expand the first step to include a larger investigation into Red Hook youth culture. The results have had a dramatic impact on the way we approached program design, content, and recruitment. The final result was a new program, Youth ECHO, that opened its doors in March, 2008. Designing any new program is a lengthy process, a series of sequential decisions each of which impacts the ultimate product. As social services, public health, and other community-based programming is looking more and more to evidence-based models, program designers are working harder than ever to make those decisions deliberately and conscientiously.

Unfortunately, in the world of youth programming the following scene is still all too common: a group of adults sitting around a conference table discussing what programmatic elements might be the most appealing and beneficial to youth. Unlike professionals who work with adults, those who work with youth often approach their jobs with an uncomplicated sense of authority; after all, each was once a teenager. The result can be a set of program components that engages only a subset of youth—those who are the most amenable to participating in leadership training programs, internship opportunities, or mentoring programs. Despite the lengths to which many of these programs go to recruit more hard-to-reach youth, many ultimately fail to do so.

Consequently, those teenagers who are the most vulnerable—those who have either dropped out of school or are dangerously close, those involved with the juvenile and criminal justice system, those with limited job prospects—fall through the proverbial cracks. The program design approach described in this report proceeds differently. We drew on the practices of ethnographic research to get closer to understanding how youth themselves feel about their social lives, their cultural milieu, their community, and their futures. By using their words, their stories and their experiences, those of us involved in building Youth ECHO acquired a unique view of youth culture and youth programming needs in Red Hook and in so doing simultaneously jump-started the necessary process of building bridges with potential program participants.

READ ON
http://www.courtinnovation.org/_uploads/documents/RH_Youth.pdf