Who We Are
Youth Adult Action Partners “YAAP”
Youth Adult Action Partners is a partnership that works together towards positive youth development and positive neighborhood change in the Sector 8 Community.
Current participants:
- Local Sector 8 youth adult partnerships participating in the Youth As Resources process
- Youth As Resources
- Youth Voice, One Vision City/County Youth Council
- NorthEast Area Development (NEAD)
- Neighbors Building Neighborhoods (NBN)
- City of Rochester Department of Parks and Recreation
- Rochester-Monroe County Youth Bureau
- New York State Office of Children and Family Services
- Family Youth Services Bureau of the United States Department of Human and Health Services
For more information or to become involved in Youth Adult Action Partners, please call NEAD at 585 482-7320 or the Rochester-Monroe County Youth Bureau at 585 753-6455.
What Is Community Youth Development?
Young people grow up in communities as well as in families, programs, and schools.
Community Youth Development is working in partnership with young people to strengthen their ties to community—family, neighborhood, school, friends—and working with communities to value and support youth.
The Positive Youth Development approach is not a new concept.
Experts on youth long ago identified four factors that allow most young people to stay on the right track:
- A sense of competence: being able to do something well
- A sense of usefulness: having something to contribute
- A sense of belonging: being part of a group or a community
- A sense of power: having control over one’s future
Young people, therefore, benefit from having opportunities to grow and develop in different aspects of their lives; intellectually, socially, psychologically, physically, and morally.
When communities learn to value and meaningfully involve youth, it is not only the young people who benefit.
When young people are actively engaged in the context of the broader community, they become valuable contributors to the quality of community life. A Positive Youth Development approach, therefore, emphasizes youth as resources, both for enhancing the quality of community life today and for building strong communities in the future.
Sector 8 Neighborhood Retreat
“Sharing memories of the past and our visions for the future”
On March 4th and 5th, 2005, at No. 33 School, about 80 individuals—youth and adults who live, work, attend school, and worship in Sector 8 gathered for a Neighborhood Retreat: “Sharing memories of the past and our visions for the future.”
During the retreat, the participants revisited the history of their community, shared knowledge about resources and needs, learned about youth development, and planned together potential projects for change in their neighborhoods.
Following the Retreat, the Sector 8 community took part in a mini-grant process to make the proposed projects for positive change into a reality.
Sector 8 Mini-Grant Process
The mini-grant process followed the Neighborhood Retreat, “Sharing memories of the past and our visions for the future” held on March 4th and 5th, 2005.
With training from Youth As Resources (YAR), groups of youth and adults from the Sector 8 community formed partnerships and planned together projects for change in their neighborhoods. The Youth-led and Youth-designed projects that address a need within the Sector 8 Community, utilizing the many talents and abilities of youth through youth-adult partnerships, will occur between June 1st and August 31st, 2005.
The Sector 8 Mini-Grant Process is funded through a grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Family and Youth Services Bureau with support from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, Rochester-Monroe County Youth Bureau, and Youth As Resources (YAR) of the Rochester-Monroe County Youth Bureau.
