Our clients wanted to change the sexual & reproductive health system in Nebraska by creating an equitable, youth-centered service delivery system that supports youth autonomy. Our team used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) to ensure that the project would be situated in the youth perspective. We hired a team of paid 15-24-year-old researchers who, with coaching from experienced evaluators, designed research questions, collected and analyzed the data, and reported back what they learned to grantee service providers and project leadership.

In an effort to continually embed youth voices into the evaluation, the YPAR team presented their results at quarterly meetings known as the Learning Collaborative. We facilitated these meetings to better coordinate multiple strategies and to foster collaboration between grantee service providers. Providing the space for open discussion, generating trust, and developing relationships between youth and service providers were all important aspects to improving this system.

To ensure that service providers improved the quality of their services, we worked with Learning Collaborative members to develop and implement guiding principles and determine how to measure them. The YPAR team also developed measures grounded in youth perspective so results could be compared—did the experience of youth accessing these services match up with the grantees’ perceptions of service delivery?