Navigating Reaching Teens as a Community-Wide Innitiative

Young people deserve to navigate environments that are uniformly strength based. 

Youth navigate multiple systems during their adolescence. These systems certainly include education and healthcare. Many youth have the privilege of engaging in after-school or athletic programs. Those youth who are deserving of our most focused attention also may engage with juvenile justice or legal systems, foster care, substance use programs and may even experience homelessness. For a young person to thrive they need to navigate these systems while being fully seen and heard. No matter the systems that people experience in adolescence, they should be treated in a strength-based manner that is sensitive to their trauma and committed to building them to their potential.

The most effective use of Reaching Teens, therefore, is when the entire community is on board. This prevents youth from experiencing care in a fractionated manner. 

‍The electronic platform of Reaching Teens allows communities to come together in shared purpose to build an environment in which young people will thrive, regardless of their life circumstances.

‍Reaching teens has a portal of entry for each of the following settings:

• Education
• Health Care
• Juvenile Justice
• Legal System
• Foster Care
• Substance Use
• Sports and Physical Recreation
• Systems that care for youth enduring homelessness or human trafficking

Many communities choose to have common sessions discussing how best to serve their adolescents. This alone creates high-yield engagement between community agencies. In these common sessions, the agencies discuss or have workshops about core elements of Reaching Teens. 

Most professional development sessions, however, will occur in the agency. And all youth-serving professionals will go back to their setting and serve youth with different goals in mind.  Therefore, Reaching Teens offers each setting a tailored experience. Assistant editors from each of these settings have created a navigational pathway that pulls from the resource and offers content most relevant to the setting.

• When an organization enters Reaching Teens through the setting-specific portal they will learn about their tailored experience.
• They will be introduced to the importance of a strength-based, trauma-sensitive approach in their setting. 
• Rather than navigating the entire body of work carefully chosen content is organized in a way that allows a streamlined fully-relevant experience. (Note: any individual can still access the entire toolkit).
• When the toolkit is entered thorough a setting-specific portal the chapter may be edited slightly to meet their needs.
• When the toolkit is entered thorough a setting-specific portal, the group learning and discussion and example cases will be drawn from their setting experience. For example, educational settings will explore cases from school settings.

Ideally, even though individual settings or unique settings have these tailored experience the community will continue to get together on a regular basis to ensure that all youth serving professionals, regardless of setting, are informed by and practice with a shared commitment to strength-based services.

Professional settings are not the only places in which youth interact with adults. Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings is a strength-based book designed for parents and caring adult community members. It is aligned with Reaching Teens and allows other adults to learn how to shape our homes and build a community in a way that positions young people to thrive.