What next?

After completing the YPAT, it is important for the Assessment Committee (including the youth representatives) to reflect on strengths and on areas they may want to focus on improving and identify concrete steps to pursue to improve the programming.

1

Reflect

The Assessment committee will look at the results in the Scoring Grid and reflect upon it as a team. The following questions may help guide the reflection process:

General reflection

  • What did you think of the domains/features? Did you think they represented our program offerings well? If not, what was missing?
  • Did anything about the final scores surprise you?

Reflect on strengths

  • Which domain(s) and key program feature(s) emerged as the strongest?
  • Are there any program feature(s) that stand out as one of our strengths?
    • What might account for the strength of these program feature(s)?
    • Is it possible to mainstream the practices which led to strong features to other areas of the program or other organizational programs?

Reflect on weaknesses

  • Which domain(s) and key program feature(s) emerged as the weakest?
  • Are there any program feature(s) that stand out as a weakness?
    • What might account for the weak key program feature(s)?
    • What actions can be taken to address the weak features?
    • Which standards are priority and should be addressed first?
    • Were there any areas that you do well in, but can easily make small/easy changes to get a higher score?
2

Develop and Implement an Action Plan

Based on the assessment results, develop an Action Plan following the steps below:

    1. Review each standard that you scored below a four, and as a committee, decide on the standards for each domain that the organization would like to address.
    2. Use the "Action Plan" sheet in the Excel workbook to determine the necessary action, roles and responsibilities, priority level, and timeline.
    3. Identify a small group who will be responsible for monitoring the action plan implementation. This group should be at least 50% youth participants.

Often, action plans include more than is possible to achieve. In this case, the facilitator will lead the committee in an exercise to select priority actions for implementation. Be sure to include youth from the reflection groups as part of this action planning process; involve them in prioritizing actions and in identifying youth roles and responsibilities for carrying out the action plans. Once the action plan page is finished, the organization should share the final plan with the youth feedback groups, and ideally with the whole organization.

3

Repeat the Process

Conduct the Assessment again, ideally one year after the initial Assessment, and repeat all the steps so that the Assessment can help your program track progress overtime.