Power of Culture Blog
YouthReach Awards of $1.87M to Support Creative Youth Development
These 85 funded programs span a broad range of organizations and disciplines across the Commonwealth
Käthe Swaback, Program Officer
I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what’s right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible. – Eve Ensler
Over the past five years Mass Cultural Council, through its work with the CYD National Partnership, has been invested in clearly defining who we are as a field, what we value, and how we can best articulate the many practices and outcomes associated with creative youth development. Documenting the beauty and depth of what transpires in creative youth development programs and understanding the crucial ingredients for success has been an important, yet elusive task.
As a field, we have wrestled with seeing how power and privilege is often associated with knowledge production, and we have been challenged to make this an inclusive process where youth perspectives, equity, and justice can be at the center of the work. At the same time, we know that as long as caring and skilled adult artists have mentored young people in their chosen art form, creative youth development practices have thrived in communities across the United States.
In this spirit, we’ve developed the “Create, Connect, Catalyze” framework to weave together perspectives from young peoples’ reflections on their experiences in creative learning environments alongside perspectives from academic research on creative learning environments. As you click onto each of the outcome areas, you can delve into how the research connects with young peoples’ experiences. We propose the “Create, Connect, Catalyze” framework as a shared ‘work-in-progress’ and hope this resource can help to articulate key impact areas that researchers, program staff, and young people agree are all essential to creative youth development.
The following key areas are tied to the Annotated Bibliography sections that can be found in the “Mapping a phenomenon, growing a field” report:
With a shared framework for creative youth development, we are hopeful that we will be in a stronger position to develop new, participatory approaches to program evaluation and assessment.
