Youth Development Insight

By Pamela Larson Nippolt Just when you thought that your youth program was doing well to DO evaluation at all, we evaluators want you to USE it, too! What does it take to make the report, and the entire evaluation process, an integral part of a youth organizations' everyday work? I've learned that building capacity to use evaluation does not depend on having a lot of fancy bells and whistles. My experiences in the reporting stage of evaluation work with youth-serving organizations have taught me that successful use of evaluation has little to do with slick reports and branded slide presentations. It is more about the right people coming together to roll up their sleeves around the findings and lessons. Others in the evaluation field have done some thinking about this and are sharing their experiences on evaluation use. Boris Volkov and Jean King provide a capacity-building checklist for those planning evaluations. Their checklist suggests that one of the first places t...

By Jessica Russo For young people entering a 21st century workforce , a global mind-set is not only important. It is vital to their healthy, happy development. What is a global mind-set, and how do we cultivate this in young people who, like adults, gravitate towards the familiar? Gupta and Govindarajan describe a global mind-set as an awareness and openness to diversity combined with a tendency and ability to integrate new knowledge and experiences across cultures. I like to think of a global mind-set in terms of the doors it opens. A global mind-set allows for healthy encounters with others representing diverse cultures, races, ages, gender, religions, lifestyles, and viewpoints. And a global mind-set allows these encounters to penetrate our experience in a way that encourages us to expand the way we think and act, combining old and new ways of going about the world. For young people (or anyone, for that matter) to develop a global mind-set, they need the opportunity to wres...