Engaging Middle School Youth at the YMCA

Four middle school kids with backpacks talking as they walk to school

Problem

Y-USA could not advise local YMCAs on middle school programming without consolidated evidence on youth engagement and retention.

YMCA of the USA (Y-USA) supports local YMCAs across the country, which serve all members of their communities—from infants to seniors. They wanted practical recommendations that could help YMCA staff strengthen youth recruitment, participation, retention, civic engagement, and leadership opportunities. Y-USA lacked data on which recruitment and retention approaches were working, and, without such data, it could not advise local associations on where to put staff time and program dollars. 

Y-USA asked NORC to identify effective approaches for specifically recruiting and retaining youth participants ages 11 to 14, both inside YMCA program and across other youth-servcing settings.

Solution

NORC is gathering evidence from YMCA programming, outside organizations, and middle schoolers themselves.

We developed a multi-method plan to examine strategies for engaging and retaining middle school-aged youth. An internal environmental scan of Y-USA program strategies, staff supports, organizational infrastructure, partnerships, youth outcomes, and evidence of effectiveness will establish what Y-USA already does and what is working.

To widen the base, we are also scanning approaches used by youth-serving organizations and interviewing national organizations, researchers, academics, and Y-USA Practice Leads. Interview notes will be analyzed using Applied Thematic Analysis which will identify transferable strategies and implementation considerations.

Finally we will bring practitioners and youth into the work directly. We will facilitate three YMCA Project Advisory Group meetings and two virtual focus groups with youth ages 11 to 14 recruited through participating YMCAs. These conversations will allow us to learn what draws young people to a program, what keeps them engaged, and which leadership and service opportunities they care about.

Result

This evidence base will guide Y-USA and other organizations when designing and measuring programming for 11- to 14-year-olds

Y-USA will receive summary reports from both environmental scans and a written account of what the advisory group and the youth focus groups surfaced. Read together, these will give the national office something it did not have: data on middle-school-age programming that supports which approaches to try, what those approaches require, and how to measure whether they are working.

Because the external scan reaches beyond YMCAs, the strategies it identifies should be useful to other organizations that are trying to reach this age group. The recommendations will reflect what 11- to 14-year-olds said is important to them, alongside evidence from practitioners, researchers, and other organizations.