Youth-Adult Partnerships in Decision Making: Disseminating and Implementing an Innovative Idea into Established Organizations and Communities

Year of production: 2008

The bottomline of this paper is a belief that youth and adults can, and should, collaborate on issues of importance runs counter to prevailing policies, institutional structures, and community norms.

4-H Youth Development is one public system that is actively seeking to disseminate and implement Y-AP. 4-H Youth Development seeks to integrate Y-AP into its own governance structures as well as those of local government and community coalitions.

Through qualitative analysis of the efforts in one Midwestern state, this study examines the contextual challenges faced by county staff—the providers of program support within 4-H Youth Development—and the ways in which county staff respond to these obstacles.