Colorado’s Youth Partnership for Health (YPH), a teen advisory committee for health issues in the state, is nearly ten years old, 25 youth members deep and eleven towns and cities strong. The goal of the YPH is to serve as a sounding board and bring youthful perspectives to all services and programs that impact youth. Adults from a wide variety of departments within the Department of Public Health, as well as external health groups, rely on the YPH to provide feedback and advice. But to really understand the importance of the YPH, you have to talk to the youth.
Marissa is a senior at East High School in Denver, Colorado. She has been a part of YPH for three years and says she joined the group because she wanted the respect of adults. “Having someone that wanted to hear what I had to say was important to me. As a youth it’s hard to find someone who really wants to listen to you. In YPH there are groups that come to ask for your opinion; your opinion is valued. I wanted to be one of the people whose opinion was sought.”
The YPH recently partnered with a group that was seeking a grant for a teen pregnancy prevention program. The group gave the YPH a copy of their grant for feedback. “It…” Marissa pauses to make sure she doesn’t come across wrong. “It wasn’t really a youth-friendly program they wanted to start,” and she laughs a little. “And as politely as we could, we told them that. They took the proposal back and redid it, even though they didn’t have to, and then resubmitted it to us. We thought it was much better, and they got the grant.”
This is one of the primary reasons that YPH is so important. There are many programs that are designed to help youth, but are not spending their money in the best way possible because they are trying to guess what kids need and then give it to them. These programs “need to seek our opinions, because we clearly know what we want and we have strong opinions about what should be done.” And really, what is the use of creating entire programs and funding streams for youth activities and youth programs if young people are not interested in them and have no input? “There is so much money going into youth programs that aren’t accomplishing anything because they don’t really listen to what the youth have to say,” affirms Marissa once again.
We all know that there is much more that can be done and a much greater potential if we work collaboratively and overcome the stereotypes of youth as irresponsible and unreliable. Time and again young people have shown themselves able and willing, indeed eager, to step up to challenges presented to them. So let us enlist the valuable opinions and perspectives of those that make up one quarter of the population of this country. Let us all use the example of the Youth Partnership for Health as a reminder of the importance of seeking youth input in all things youth-related.
Anne-Marie Braga, Director of Adolescent Health in the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and adult staff for the YPH can be reached by phone at (303) 692-2946 and by email at anne-marie.braga@state.co.us
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