Mission

Youth Communication equips and empowers educators and youth workers with real teen-written stories and a literacy-rich training model to engage struggling youth and build their social and emotional learning skills.

Our stories, developed in a rigorous writing program, are uniquely compelling to youth whose voices are missing from mainstream content. The stories model social and emotional learning, and show teens how to make positive changes in their lives. They also motivate teens to read and write.

Our award-winning curricula and professional development are created around these stories. They turn classrooms and programs into dynamic and encouraging learning environments by helping educators and youth workers become more compassionate and effective at building the skills that struggling teens need to lead successful, meaningful lives.

What We Do

We are in the process of implementing a Strategic Plan that is aimed at scaling our new model for national expansion by 2020. Successful plan implementation includes institutionalizing sustainable project management, human resources management systems, and the following objectives:
1. Build education department: Create and document product development and delivery processes, develop and test new products (e.g. social emotional learning, gender equity, juvenile justice, reading comprehension), create assessment instruments and data collection tools, and pilot and test summer educator training institute.
2. Align teen magazine writing program: Hire an additional writing instructor to increase capacity of writing program. The writing program will serve a larger group of teens who will work to produce the type and quality of stories to enhance curricula and training.
3. Strengthen and align fundraising and business approach: Develop and test cost model with projected revenue streams, increase income from government funding and contracts as well as individual and foundation donors, and create comprehensive marketing and development plans.
4. Align marketing and messaging to better represent and promote our new program model: Develop new baseline messaging that makes our “value add” clear to our stakeholders, stage revamp of all of our public facing communications (websites, e-blasts, social media, brochures, and investor presentations), and develop a comprehensive communications plan.