Community for Youth

Mission:

Community for Youth (CfY) inspires and supports students to be their best selves through mentoring, learning experiences, and a powerful community.

What We Do:

CfY connects Seattle high school students with compatible mentors for a program lasting one academic year (September - June). In addition to one-on-one meetings, our students and mentors meet monthly in small groups of seven to eight pairs (known as Family Groups), and in large groups of up to 30 pairs (known as Learning Communities), for directed workshops that help our students build confidence, determination, and self-awareness. 

CfY also provides mentors with a comprehensive support system, including monthly mentor-only workshops that give our mentors the tools they need to succeed. Mentoring pairs are also supported and monitored through match support calls conducted by CfY program staff.

How We Go Above and Beyond:

CfY programming evolves and adapts to meet the dynamic needs of our students in a rapidly-changing world. We serve our students by stepping past traditional one-to-one mentoring models in the following ways:

1. We offer continuous training for mentors and connect mentors with peer support.

For many adults interested in mentoring, youth mentorship presents both a learning curve and an exciting opportunity for personal growth. Mentoring relationships, like all relationships, are unique, and they will likely have ups and downs, moments of joy, moments of challenge, and “pauses”. Because Community for Youth recognizes the complex and dynamic nature of these relationships, we kick off the program year with a training series that lays the foundation for a positive mentoring experience, and host recurring mentor workshops every two months throughout the program year. 

Topics covered during mentor workshops include (but are not limited to) cultural humility, attunement, youth voice, and effective conversations about behavior change. These sessions also create a space for peer support, and time is carved out for mentors to “troubleshoot” and discuss their experiences in group settings. 

By supporting our adult participants throughout their journey and giving them evidence-based resources to be the best mentor possible, we can prepare them for working with youth who may have drastically different lived experiences from themselves, and mitigate harm or misunderstandings that may result.

2. We welcome and honor youth voices by creating opportunities for student feedback and leadership. 

The students we serve are capable, powerful, resilient, and knowledgeable, and they have a lot to teach adults! We give our students power, voice, and choice in all aspects of our programming, from beginning to end.

We open our program year with a Student Welcome Night, in which students are invited to suggest and vote on activities, topics, and formatting for monthly Community Workshops. We collect feedback from students through continuous, data-centered evaluations, and through our student leadership team, LeaderCorps. 

By providing youth with multiple opportunities to plan and respond to CfY programming and activities, we activate our students as leaders and place them at the center of their own experience and story.

3. We proactively implement feedback to adapt our programming and better serve our community.

The needs of our students are dynamic and rapidly evolving. 

As the world we live in changes quickly, so do the challenges faced by youth in our community. For example, programming that was effective and helpful to youth in a pre-pandemic world may not be as relevant in 2024. 

To understand the needs of our students and plan programming that is most effective, we ask our participants to fill out evaluations at the beginning of the program year and throughout the program year after every Community Workshop, training, and CfY-related event. This data informs our planning process for events remaining in the current year, and for events to take place in the following year. 

We also meet with our LeaderCorps team once-a-month to reflect on recent events and activities, discuss feedback, and come up with ways to put student suggestions into practice at upcoming Workshops. When we intentionally gather and implement youth feedback, we are able to deliver content that is relevant, engaging, and important to our students.