Sidebar #29 - What is Youth Development?

I’ve mentioned on several occasions that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer in Youth Development, but what does that mean? In layman’s terms, I’m kind of a teachers’ assistant, but it is a little more nuanced than that. Youth Development is a pretty broad sector and volunteers are given quite a bit of runway to conduct unique projects. In Costa Rica, we are tasked with creating projects related to 3 categories: promoting youth wellbeing, facilitating youth participation in the community, and strengthening youth support systems. As you can probably tell, those are fairly general topics which give us lots of flexibility to create activities that align with our backgrounds as well as community needs. What is not officially part of the YD framework is teaching English. We are allowed to help with English informally, but we have not been trained to do so and Peace Corps Costa Rica has a whole different sector of volunteers dedicated to English Education. More often than not, YD volunteers work alongside teachers to help teach “life skills” or soft skills like teamwork, leadership, empathy, etc. Volunteers also frequently assist in sports, arts, and recreation projects. We are also permitted to work with adults and to do projects in the community outside of the classroom; however, working with youth is our primary focus.


 

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