Date: Saturday, April 18, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I’m Jess Detrio, an Evaluation Specialist at ETR, a nonprofit organization focused on improving the health and well?being of youth and communities. ETR partners with innovation development teams participating in the Reimagining Youth?Centered Strategies and Engagement (RYSE) project. RYSE supports teams as they intentionally integrate youth engagement into program design, delivery, and evaluation.
As part of this work, we facilitate in?person Youth Engagement Theory of Change (YETOC) workshops with innovation teams and youth advisors. In these workshops, teams examine youth engagement practices and begin to surface assumptions they hold about youth capacity, readiness, and roles in decision?making. A YETOC helps move youth engagement from intention to accountability by making explicit how youth roles, influence, and decision?making authority are expected to contribute to stronger, more responsive programs. By examining assumptions together, teams and youth can better understand how these beliefs shape, and sometimes constrain, both young people’s development and program outcomes, and use that insight to make more intentional decisions about youth roles and influence.
One of the most powerful uses of a YETOC is uncovering assumptions adults make about working alongside youth. Common assumptions include ideas such as youth lacking the time or attention to participate in decision?making, youth needing adults to lead or facilitate, or youth lacking the experience to contribute to evaluation.
When young people are invited into these conversations, they often challenge these assumptions directly. They describe how meaningful roles, clear purpose, and shared decision?making increase their confidence, motivation, and willingness to engage. By documenting these assumptions within the theory of change, teams can address them intentionally or turn them into learning questions, such as: What supports help youth participate in evaluation design? How does shared leadership affect youth growth and program relevance?
Another shift we support in these workshops is engaging youth in designing youth engagement activities themselves. Rather than asking them to fit into adult?designed advisory structures, we work with teams and youth advisors to co?design how engagement happens. Youth help define how often they meet, what activities feel meaningful, and how they want to contribute across design, delivery, and evaluation.
Through this process, youth articulate what they hope to personally gain through participation, such as building leadership skills, informing program design, or gaining clarity about their strengths and capacities. At the same time, teams see how co?designed engagement leads to programs that better reflect youth priorities, interests, and lived experiences.
We encourage teams to treat a YETOC as a learning tool rather than a static product. During workshops and coaching sessions, we use this framework to document evolving strategies, outcomes, and assumptions. This creates space to test ideas, reflect on what is working, and revise approaches as youth engagement deepens.
Drawing from youth participatory evaluation approaches, a theory of change can help teams track not only program outcomes, but also changes in youth empowerment, agency, and relationships with adults.
Naming youth engagement outcomes in a theory of change helps teams recognize that engagement is not only a means to improve programs, but also an intervention that affects young people directly. Programs also benefit when youth help shape design, delivery, and evaluation, leading to clearer priorities and more relevant strategies.
We encourage practitioners to use youth engagement theories of change throughout a program’s lifecycle. Revisiting the framework with young people helps teams ask: Is this still how we want to be engaged? How are these outcomes showing up? What assumptions still need to be tested or reframed? Even small practices, like taking 15 minutes to name one assumption your team is making about youth engagement and checking it with young people, can surface blind spots adults don’t see on their own. When treated as living documents, YETOCs help keep youth voice central as programs evolve.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.