The Innovation Center for community and youth development has a training manual for “unleashing the potential of both young people and adults” based on mutual respect and trust. Youth-Adult Partnerships: A Training Manual provides activities and resources that guide a practitioner through the process of engaging youth and adults to create community change. It includes “nuts and bolts” skill development activities.

In a recent innovate newsletter (Fall 2005), Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development President Wendy Wheeler again emphasized that new paradigms of partnership are needed more than ever. And, that “young people are crucial in creating community change not only because of their positive spirit and can-do attitude but because they understand the reality of their communities in ways that others don’t. They aren’t afraid to share their opinions, no matter how unorthodox. Looking through their eyes, we can see our communities more fully, address issues more comprehensively, and create more powerful and lasting results.”

The issue highlights the establishment of Youth Build Immigrant Power (YBIP) as part of the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA), a group empowering Asian women working in low-wage industries in Oakland, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. The youth outreach launched in 1997 helped to strengthen the personal and cultural support of young people with their mothers and grandmothers, who were garment workers. Together the youth-adult partnership helped to change the lives of the women in the garment industry by negotiating a healthier work environment in the factories such as offering health and safety training and installing ergonomic seating in work stations.

An insightful suggestion offered in building successful youth-adult partnerships, and something we often forget, is that the most important role in a partnership is “to give both parties a different way to relate to each other.”