A Client Co-Authored Website to Build Peaceful Empowerment for Youth with Marginalized Identities Who Are Profoundly Disadvantaged

Background and Purpose: This formative evaluation research occurs in the context of a funded project creating cross-age mentoring services and studying their impact with youth in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods in a Midwest urban setting. This paper explores the impact of a website co-designed by youth for themselves and their peers. We trained the youth mentors to interview each other about program services, including the development of the website. A human rights, strengths perspective, empowerment theory and participatory action research provide the conceptual frameworks.

Methods: This is a formative evaluation of the service process with youth residing in high-poverty, high-crime communities in a large Midwestern city, exploring the use of a website as part of a service package that also included cross-age mentoring.  The mentors (N=94, average age 16, 65% female) were asked to evaluate services and describe their experiences of services and the website development and implementation. All mentors participating in the program for more than 3 months were taught to interview each other, using an interview protocol the youth co-designed.  The interview questions elicited youths’ perspectives about the website development and implementation, and their opinions about its impact for themselves and their peers. Interviews were tape recorded, transcribed, and analyzed qualitatively using a constant comparison model generating axial codes, which then could also be quantified in a content analysis. Results were member-checked with youth, who also co-authored the final paper.

Results: This paper describes the service process as well as youths’ opinions about the website impact. Youth made many important contributions to the website development and design as well as content.  They contributed poetry, songs, illustrations, and commentaries. Their suffering in response to losses of peers and family members, and members of the community as a result of community violence led to the decision to commemorate their lives as part of the website content. Uplifting truths about their struggles, injustices, and memorializing those lost resonates with other peace-building community action efforts in the wake of significant violence such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation commission. Far from being passive victims or ignorant of society’s racism and devaluing of impoverished youth, these young people saw the website as an essential way to counter and reframe dominant societal narratives about them, create a space to mourn the loss of beloved persons, uplift their common humanity, and fulfill their determination to care for and bring about peace in their communities. 

Conclusions and Implications: While new social media can unfortunately sometimes escalate violence, they also have significant potential for empowerment and peace-building efforts. Services for youth with marginalized identities can include positive website development as a way to make meaning of and affirm their complex social identities while advocating for their needs. Centering the resilience and contributions of the youth can provide policymakers with an improved understanding in order to provide optimal services. Policymakers and practitioners can benefit from improved understanding of impoverished youth that results from their self-expression of their concerns and priorities.