About CAYD
CAYD fills the gap for youth-serving organizations by providing their staff with opportunities to access high-quality training, evaluation, and technical assistance without leaving the community.
Goals
The four main goals of CAYD are to:
- Provide training opportunities for youth service professionals and organizations to enhance helping skills specific to youth interventions.
- Disseminate best, promising practices and translated research that support youth, family, and community interventions.
- Provide technical assistance to organizations seeking to design and/or implement youth development interventions.
- Employ empowerment evaluation practices to build the capacity of community based organizations to assess their effectiveness.
Services
Technical Assistance
Research literature is written for audiences of researchers. CAYD seeks to translate basic science, intervention research, and other forms of data into applied skills and points of intervention. Once we find interventions that are promising we will share them with the community in the form of workshops and Think Tanks. We want to have regular meetings where we are shifting the paradigm from prevention to youth development. We believe research is an important tool to building sustainable youth development interventions.
In kid-friendly terms, coding is using a set of instructions to communicate with computers. CAYD provides a link below to demonstrate how kids can learn how to code, as well the benefits of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwMeINjRl6Y
Research Dissemination
Research literature is written for audiences of researchers. CAYD seeks to translate basic science, intervention research, and other forms of data into applied skills and points of intervention. Once we find interventions that are promising we will share them with the community in the form of workshops and Think Tanks. We want to have regular meetings where we are shifting the paradigm from prevention to youth development. We believe research is an important tool to building sustainable youth development interventions.
Training and Professional Development
CAYD offers training and professional development workshop opportunities for youth service providers...
Professional development and skills training youth services are limited in communities especially for organizations with scarce resources. CAYD offers training and professional development workshop opportunities for youth service providers. A training schedule, with local and national workshop facilitators, is derived from responses to the Needs and Strengths Assessment Survey . Training and Professional Development Workshops are offered at a nominal fee (limited scholarships are provided).آ To reduce cost and time away from the office, workshops can be conducted at your location on the condition that YSO collaborate with each other, when possible, to maximize workshop attendance. Our aim is to provide training and professional development opportunities that will build the capacity of youth serving organizations in the array of youth services.
Empowerment Evaluation
CAYD consultants utilize empowerment evaluation approaches to improving the quality of services and to build evidence of program effectiveness.
Evaluation planning improves the quality of youth services and enhances funding proposals, yet many programs are not properly evaluated beyond success stories of a few youth. CAYD Consultants utilize empowerment evaluation approaches to improve the quality of services and to build evidence of program effectiveness. We provide process (formative) and outcome (summative) evaluation planning for your intervention. Our strategy is to work collaboratively early in the intervention design process to figure out the intended outcomes of an intervention and necessary resources to foster those outcomes. Participants in our evaluation workshops will improve their efficacy with evaluation methods so they can develop their own evaluation plans. The goal of our evaluation consultation is to build the evaluation capacity of community based programs thus improving the quality of youth services and effectiveness of interventions.
The Principles of Empowerment Evaluation
(Adapted from Fetterman, D.M. & Wandersman, A. (2005) Empowerment Evaluation: Principles
in Practice, Guilford Press)
• Improvement
• Community Ownership
• Inclusion
• Democratic Participation
• Social Justice
• Community Knowledge
• Evidenced Based Strategies
• Capacity Building
• Organizational Learning
• Accountability
• Multi-Cultural Knowledge
• Socio-Historical Understanding
• Self-Knowledge and Introspection