Youth Leading Youth: Exploring an Emerging Evaluator's Positionality in Youth-Centered Evaluation

Young people are often framed as learners rather than leaders who are dependent on adults teaching them in the hope that they will one day be experts and leaders. But what does it look and feel like to be a leader as a young person and learn from youth? By focusing on my own positionality and the tensions in navigating youth-centered evaluation practices as an emerging evaluator myself, this reflective essay explores my positionality as a young person and emerging evaluator leading and learning from youth-centered evaluation work. I am aware of and continue to explore how my intersectional identity as a 26-year-old, white, cisgender woman influences how I navigate academia and the evaluation field.

As an emerging evaluator, I am working to understand the power I hold as a young person within youth-centered evaluation, a contemporary approach that aims to engage and center youth who have not been included in previous evaluation frameworks (Montrosse-Moorhead et al., 2024). Montrosse-Moorhead, Schröter, and Becho give a visual representation of these key differences in their article The Garden of Evaluation Approaches. In contrast to frameworks like theory-driven evaluation, more contemporary frameworks like Transformative Participatory Evaluation seek to address power dynamics, focus on activism, and engage participants in more meaningful and authentic ways by shifting power dynamics and creating collaborative evaluations (Montrosse-Moorhead et al., 2024). The incorporation of youth voices in evaluation and youth-led evaluation continues evolving. Youth Participatory Evaluation (YPE) and Youth Transformative Participatory (YTP) approaches are evaluation methods that aim to empower youth through evaluations with YTP centering youth as leaders of evaluations (Bitar et al., 2023).

When considering positionality, age is unique in that it is a more fluid characteristic compared to other pieces of ourselves. Age is also ever-changing. Although I do not feel any different from when I was 24, now I am no longer considered a “youth” by some definitions. For example, the United Nations defines youth as people aged 15–24 years old (United Nations, 2018, p. 12), but the definition of youth differs by culture and discipline. Through my work in evaluation, I was introduced to the term adultism. Adultism encompasses the beliefs, behaviors, and social structures that consider adults superior to young people (Corney et al., 2022). Adultism pushes harmful, negative narratives about youth that permeate into communities. The structural and systemic harm of adultism leads to oppressive practices and beliefs surrounding young people. Adultism is often intersected with other forms of oppression such as racism or sexism—exacerbating the harmful impacts of adultism on youth and communities. While I never heard the term adultism used, I experienced and witnessed it myself throughout my life and academic journey. Adultism can look like young people not being included in decision making due to their age, dismissing the ideas of young people, or enacting policies that affect or harm youth. To combat adultism and deconstruct oppressive research norms, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) creates spaces for young people to lead decision making and create actionable changes within their communities (Bettencourt, 2020). I became familiar with adultism and the power of YPAR and youth voices through my own evaluation journey.

As the youngest person in my doctoral program in Justice Studies, I felt I lacked experience compared to my peers. Additionally, I perceived that my peers underestimated me in part due to my age. Yet in other instances, my age has benefited my youth-centered evaluation work. During my first year in my doctoral program, I was invited to act as a Graduate Assistant for a program evaluation of the New Orlean's Youth Master Plan (YMP). The YMP is a comprehensive, ten-year road map that aims to support all youth of New Orleans, 0 to 24 years. My professor and I were tasked with evaluating the YMP's implementation to date for the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB). We were entrusted with centering youth voices throughout the evaluation process. As a youth myself—24 at the time of the evaluation—I quickly found myself stepping between worlds as a young person and emerging evaluator.

While evaluating the YMP, I was offered a related position to act as an evaluation consultant to four YPAR projects funded by CYPB through a program called Revolutionary Researchers (2024). I remember being nervous the first few times I went to the Revolutionary Researchers meetings. A million “what ifs” flooded through my head, most of those thoughts connected to me not being the right fit for this role due to not seeing myself as an “expert”:

What if I’m not qualified for this?

The first meeting was intimidating. The adults who organized Revolutionary Researchers asked me to give feedback to youth researchers on their research projects. It felt uncomfortable; I felt tension within myself. On one hand, I was around the same age as the researchers, but I was also aware of how I, a white woman coming from a PhD program, working with mostly Black researchers younger than myself, could reinforce harmful, oppressive research practices. Throughout my academic journey, I continued to be taught the narrative of neutral research. I have worked to unlearn the harmful narratives, knowing research is not neutral and is an ongoing balance that demands self-reflection and ongoing consciousness intersectionality. While sharing one identity with youth researchers might have built bridges, only sharing one identity sometimes did not feel like enough to build a sense of camaraderie. Being awkward and shy myself did not help. I found it hard to navigate my relationship with the researchers since this initial interaction was me telling them how to improve their own projects, even though they had never met me before. I relied on my age as a bridge to create connections with the researchers, listening to the researchers’ interests and sharing interests. With every Saturday meeting, I felt trust building as we traversed their research projects together. Building trust is essential in research and evaluation. Trust building for me includes showing care and interests for each person, being vulnerable, and sharing power.

As a young person, I balance when and how I bring my age into my evaluation work. Sharing the same generation as the youth researchers was interesting to navigate, as I occupied the liminal space between peer and “research expert” mentor. I was mindful that these were not my YPAR projects, but rather the ideas and work of each team of young people. I aimed to scaffold the teams to support their unique needs and goals. Each project addressed different youth-centered topics in New Orleans. From creating surveys and interview questions to analyzing the data collected, the teams and I learned together. All the researchers had experiences and insights to share, which added depth and life to the projects. During research sessions, researchers would often ask me questions about their projects, wanting to make sure they did the research the “right way.” I realized that I was having those same doubts about myself, “what if I don’t have the right answer? “ But instead of looking for a ‘right’ answer, I instead asked myself “how can I support their voices.” So, my response was usually “what do you think” or “what would you like to do,” always with the aim to give them autonomy over the direction, design, and execution of their own projects. This is just one way that I tried to break away from adultism and return power and decision making to the youth researchers and in alignment with youth voice.

In practicing youth-centered evaluation, I found a balance between being a young person myself and sharing my skills with teams. I often felt like I was on a seesaw, trying to stay in the middle and balance two sides of my positionality: youth and mentor. Each Saturday, I prepared an outline of the research goal each YPAR team should work on during our session. These outlines were reviewed and approved by adults involved in the project. I found myself putting my foot on different sides of the seesaw, sometimes acting as an adult when planning lessons and then as more my authentic self when stepping back to allow the youth teams to lead.

Growing up in the same generation as the researchers, I was able to make connections easier than if I were older. I felt most authentic and comfortable when collaborating with the youth researchers. I could be myself, no code switching or professionalism required, which was a newer experience for me coming from academia. The space we created and fostered as a team allowed me to show up as an emerging evaluator and research “expert” but also my full self, dressing casual in overalls and t-shirts and not having to adjust how I speak. Reflecting on my experience with Revolutionary Researchers, I think that the ability to be fully and authentically ourselves helped foster a space that young people and adults could build trust. Many of the researchers and I also shared the same interests, I even attend the same college as one of the researchers, and we see each other on campus. One sticker I had on my laptop at the time was a Sailor Moon sticker, a Japanese manga series and anime. At the beginning of a Saturday meeting, I sat next to one of the quieter researchers. When I opened my laptop, she looked over and instantly recognized my Sailor Moon sticker. We started talking about who our favorite character was and what we loved about Sailor Moon. We had common interests. My age could create instant connections and build trust.

Over the following months, I worked closely alongside adult research experts, CYPB staff, and adult mentors to support the youth researchers in completing their projects. As an intergenerational team, we built trust, navigated obstacles, and celebrated researchers’ wins along the way. By July of 2024, the researchers completed their projects and were ready to share their findings and recommendations with the community. CYPB created a summer event called Youth Connections Festival, which brought together the work of Revolutionary Researchers along with youth artists and advocates across New Orleans to celebrate youth voices. The event was filled with young people and adults who support youth. Filled with music, art, and joy, each research team led a panel discussion on their project, findings, and recommendations. It was an amazing experience for me to see the youth researchers confident and proud of the work they had created. Being a part of this project reshaped how I thought about leadership and learning and what youth voice in evaluation.

Seeing other young people grow their self-confidence through evaluations helped me realize my passion for YPAR and youth-centered evaluation. I realize now that my age creates connections, and I can be both a young person and a mentor at the same time. While adulthood brings experience accumulated by age each day, bolstering academic and professional confidence, I gradually grow further removed from being a member of the youth community I research with. But I cannot let adulthood diminish my care and dedication to youth-led research. Instead, I seek to acknowledge and address the harm adultism causes. Valuing and centering intergenerational collaboration, sharing power, and centering youth researchers as experts to learn from, are all practices I continue to hold as I grow in evaluation.

My own mentoring experiences have shaped how much I value mentorship. I am fortunate to have positive mentoring experiences, and a major thread that connected these positive mentoring experiences was having mentors who trusted and shared power. My current mentor and I have worked as an intergenerational team, learning from each other rather than mentoring in a traditional sense—where the adult mentor imparts knowledge to the mentee, usually younger or seen as less experienced. Rather, my current mentor and I reshape what mentorship meant to us, a relationship built on trust that values the experiences and knowledge that both individuals bring to the mentoring space. Through sharing power, valuing the experiences and skills both of us brought to our evaluation team, my mentor and I are able to lean into each other's strengths and grow with each other. As I move further into adulthood, I aspire to be both a mentor who understands mentorship as a cyclical, ongoing process and mentee who learns from others regardless of age. Adult evaluators must trust young people and the new experiences and skills youth bring to evaluation teams.

Conclusion

While this essay reflects my own positionality, it is also a call to evaluators. For young and emerging evaluators to step forward, be bold, and innovate. Bring your whole self to evaluation and do not sacrifice pieces of yourself in the process. For experienced evaluators to share space, reshape approaches to evaluation, and to listen to youth. In research and evaluation, we need to continue to challenge the concepts of mentor and mentee and what it means to hold both those roles simultaneously. Tools like The Garden of Evaluation Approaches (Montrosse-Moorhead et al., 2024) can aid in analyzing how we approach evaluation—highlighting the variety of practices and awareness surrounding unique frameworks. I often speak in this essay about the balance I try to hold in evaluation spaces. But duality is more than a delicate balance; it is an intricate ballet where trust is essential. Building trust in evaluation is an ongoing process. It requires evaluators to be vulnerable, authentic, and whole. To reflect on our own positionality and how we approach evaluations. I have come to learn that trust is an action in evaluation—whether it is building trust by sharing a common interest like an anime character, stepping back and learning from young people, or holding space for young people to be creative. Evaluation is a collaboration that can span generations, and we must be mindful of how we bring ourselves to evaluations. We must work together to foster spaces to support youth leadership authentically through co-collaboration, participatory methods like YPAR, and power sharing.

Centering youth voices bridges gaps within multigenerational evaluation teams, demonstrating the importance of youth co-collaboration in evaluations. For generations, youth prove to be at the forefront of change—organizing protests, leading innovations, and finding creative solutions. The young generations of today have insight to share now, not later. Through sharing my story and positionality, I hope to contribute to the evaluation field by documenting personal lessons learned about centering perspectives from young people, holding space to elevate youth voices, and fostering intergenerational mentorship. By being my authentic self, especially in my evolving identity as an emerging evaluator, I hope to highlight the necessity and advantage of youth voices leading evaluations.