This month, Queen Center attended Truth Initiative/Campaign for Tobacco-Free kids Coordinator Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. This was a National conference for youth coordinators working all around the country to educate youth on tobacco, advocacy, and education.
We attended several breakout groups and training sessions on youth-adult partnerships, youth recruitment strategies, equity and social justice in tobacco education, youth engagement post-covid, and intersectionality. We learned so many new strategies to use moving forward in our partnerships and youth work.
Youth-adult partnerships are comprised of 3 pillars. They must be collective, impactful, and distributed based on skills, expertise, networks, and interests. These pillars are used to make sure that the youth-adult partnerships (Y-AP) are beneficial and appropriate, while challenging and empowering youth to have an active role in the partnership and advocacy work. Our trainings discussed the core elements of Y-AP's which are; shared decision making, natural mentor dynamic (meaning that adults can learn just as much from youth as the youth can learn from us), bidirectional learning, trust building, and leadership development opportunities.
We also learned about intersectionality, which was defined at our conference as a prism of identities, showing how overlapping identities relate to social structures of systemic racism and oppression. Intersectionality merges identity markers to create a more truthful and complex illustration of our world.
Using the lens of intersectionality when working with our youth takes on a more holistic approach and recognizes that our youth have several identity markers that total up to the sum of who they are. Knowing this can help us be better, more genuine and understanding youth mentors and coordinators.
We are so excited to use all of the things we learned at Coordinator Conference to help our youth continue their advocacy work!
