Just As I Am Youth Empowerment (JAIA) Evaluation

JAIA is a youth leadership and participatory action mentoring program in the NYC area. JAIA works with diverse youth to build resilience and positive youth development in many spheres. REV has partnered with the JAIA organization for several years to help them develop and implement process and outcome evaluation that is centered in the values of the JAIA program. Thus, the evaluation is a community engaged, collaborative endeavor that uses participatory action research methods. To date, we have conducted key informant interviews about young adults’ views on the impact of JAIA on their lives. The project is ongoing and hopes to have implications both for understanding the impact of JAIA, refinements to the program, and also to develop new youth-centered evaluation practices for program evaluation.