Tools and Resources for Working with Youth
Program Design
Comprehensive Camp Design Guidebook
As part of over 15 years of front line experience designing and implementing camp programs from Boston to Malawi to Thailand, we have created numerous resources and tools to help fledgling camps launch effectively. This guidebook is by far out most ambitious creation. At 300+ pages in length, it includes not only a detailed narrative on what it takes to develop a camp, but also companion chapters of tools you can use in all aspects of camp development and implementation.
Building Program Cultures that Empower and Heal
Based on research on resiliency and the recovering from trauma, this presentation explores how a youth program’s culture can serve as a powerful agent of behavior change and provide important healing outcomes for children and youth. Learn about 5 actions every youth program can take to build a strong, positive culture, that can serve as its own additional protective factor in the work you are doing to help children and youth grow, heal and develop.
Bringing Trauma-Informed Practices Into Interventions For Youth
This document is intended to be used as a guide for programs who aspire to align their program structure with the most current research and best practices around building a trauma-informed intervention. Based on Edgework's experience designing programs for youth in South Africa, Malawi, Ethiopia, Gaza and the United States, we are excited to share with you our "checklist" of design principles that can help you bring more of a trauma-informed approach to the work you do with vulnerable populations.
Youth Development
HOW Great Teachers Teach
This resource presents 10 practical techniques that great teachers can use to maximize student learning.
Fostering Vital Connections
The relationship between the child or adolescent and you, the caring adult, can exert a powerful positive influence on that young person's life. This "vital connection" can literally serve as its own behavior change agent. This resource, originally written as part of a training manual for after-school youth workers and project coordinators reveals five essential skills and behaviors, that when practiced consistently, can help to truly leverage the caring adult relationship as a vehicle for positive and often dramatic influence on a young person's life.
Principles of Working with Older Teens
There are a number of critical principles that need to be understood in order to design and facilitate effective programming for older teenagers. This documents captures some of these important principles and presents practical examples of how to apply them in your work.
Vital Conversations: Dialogue that can Change a Child's Life
Conversations can change behavior. From our research and frontline experience working with youth, we have uncovered FOUR "vital conversations" that we can have with children and youth that have the potential to deeply and positively affect their lives. Read about these four vital conversations and how you can achieve positive outcomes when these conversations happen.
25 Ways To Show The Child We Believe They Can Succeed
Promoting competence and mastery is one of the cornerstones of self esteem and self efficacy. It is part of our job as a caring adult in their lives to show them, not just with words, but with actions, that we genuinely believe they can succeed. This list will provide you with many different ways you can do this.
Listening to Stories That A Child's Behavior Can Tell Us
Most of us, irrespective of age, do not always have the capacity to articulate exactly what we are feeling and why we might behave a certain way, especially when we experience stress, crisis or trauma. For a child, this communication deficit can be profound. Therefore, as caring youth workers, we must look to other means to fully understand what a child might be experiencing. For children affected by complex trauma, and for many children in general, their actions may be the only means they have to let you know they are suffering or need help. This resource attempts to explain behavior from a new perspective. Our goal is to help youth workers "see" behavior as a story that a child is trying to tell and for them to learn and empathize from these stories.
Curriculum and Manuals
LearnSmart™: A Curriculum to Develop Study and Stress Tolerance Skills for 9 to 12 Year Olds
LearnSmart™ is a 17 session curriculum that teaches children a set of simple and practical techniques to improve their study and learning skills. It is specifically designed to help children suffering from high stress, in long-term crisis or post-conflict/emergency environments where the school systems and typical supports for children may be eroded or lacking. This curriculum helps the child to take a degree of control over some of their stress symptoms that could be preventing them from learning and succeeding in school. This document is an overview and introduction to the curriculum.
16 Games That Promote Conversations about Resilience
16 complete activity guides that describe, step-by-step, how to set up, lead and debrief each game. Many of these games may be familiar; however, each activity guide has been custom created to turn the games into powerful and engaging platforms for conversations about resilience, self efficacy and confidence.
The Four Smart Problem-Solving Skills: A 20-Hour Conflict Mitigation and Problem-Solving Curriculum for Ages 9 to 15
First we looked at the very best conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, problem-solving and resilience-promoting curriculum and programs being used today. We combined that with our own research and review of how children navigate through the maze of stressors, challenges and pressures they face. Then we piloted our curriculum in one of the most difficult places in the world to be a child: Gaza. The result is a fast-paced, fun and simple 19 session curriculum. This curriculum equips children with four skills they can use in a wide range situations in their lives, including: in school, in their homes, and on the street and play spaces in their communities. This is a real-life, skill-based and interactive approach to helping children truly manage stress, conflict and solve problems. This curriculum was especially designed for children who have had their lives disrupted by trauma but it can work for all children.
Creating a Caring and Child-Centered Program: A Manual for Organizations That Aspire to Change the Lives of Children and Youth
This comprehensive manual is designed for any program that wants to maximize their impact and potential for positive behavior change. This manual was originally designed for new programs. However, even if your program is already fully established, the concepts, tools and program design principles in this manual will elevate your program to an entirely new level of impact. Our exhaustive research has produced a framework for behavior change and program impact that is unprecedented in youth work. 200+ pages of research, program principles, tools and resources combine to make this one of the most powerful resources available today.
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