From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes
Post written by Milbrey McLaughlin, founding director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University. Rebecca A. London is a Senior Researcher at the John W. Gardner Center overseeing all analyses conducted with the Youth Data Archive. They are the editors of From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes.
Policy discussions about how to improve academic, social, and physical outcomes for today's youth typically take place solely within the domains of many individual youth-serving sectors. For instance, much of educators' current deliberation considers responses to the new Common Core State Standards and how to increase students' high school graduation and college attendance. Health professionals may focus on asthma management or obesity reduction. In social services, providers may talk about how to create seamless transitions for foster youth. Despite their common focus on young people, these youth-serving sectors typically are disconnected from, and uninformed about, each other's programs, policies, and approaches to serving youth—when in fact, local youth are constantly moving between them. These so-called institutional "silos" can result in unintended gaps in the web of supports that youth need, duplication of services, poorly aligned goals, and missed opportunities to be mutually reinforcing. how the community as a whole, rather than any one agency or program, meets the developmental needs of children and youth is important for supporting their pathways to productive adulthood.
One way to improve coordination and learning among youth-serving organizations is through data sharing, but this rarely occurs due to practical, technical, or legal difficulties. Each youth-serving organization collects and maintains a wealth of information on its "own" participating youth, without the ability to consider the other developmental areas the organization may be influencing or the broader set of community supports and services that shape child and youth outcomes.
In a new book, From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes, we argue that new cross-sector tools are necessary and available to support cross-institutional community youth development. We, along with our co-authors, describe the Youth Data Archive, a project of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University. The Youth Data Archive (YDA) is a cross-agency, integrated
