Abstract
Mental and behavioral health disorders are major issues facing young people in the United States; yet, the majority of youth who need support do not get help. Young people tend not to get help for 2 interacting reasons: system barriers that prevent youth from seeking help, and personal reasons that can influence them to forgo treatment. Youth–Adult Partnerships (Y-APs) have the potential to improve mental health programming and increase service utilization because they create space to blend youth and service provider knowledge and experience. This article provides a detailed case study of a youth–adult partnership’s 2-year community assessment and strategic planning process that led to the development of an innovative mental health model that has been sustained for 15 years. This article highlights the practices that contributed to adult transformation and the importance of adults’ roles as boundary spanners in the implementation and sustainability of an intervention that addresses both system barriers and personal reasons youth forgo mental health treatment.
Highlights
Youth involvement in the development of health promotion programs can lead to more appropriate and effective interventions (Coates & Howe, 2016; Reed & Miller, 2014)
We argue that this form of boundary spanning allowed young people’s visions to take root in the community and permitted their ideas and knowledge to affect the community problem of youth’s access to mental health services
We conclude that when adults are able to take what they gain in the YAP and move into adult spaces, long-term community change can occur
Summary
Youth involvement in the development of health promotion programs can lead to more appropriate and effective interventions (Coates & Howe, 2016; Reed & Miller, 2014). Fewer studies have examined the extent to which Y-APs lead to sustained community change (Finn & Checkoway, 1998) Those that have focused on community change have explored how young people’s involvement led to the creation of new, more effective programs (Burns & Birrell, 2014), policy change (OgnevaHimmelberger, Ross, Burdick, & Simpson, 2010), and culture change (Reed & Miller, 2014). In the HOPE case, we see adults who were transformed by their experience working with youth in the youth–adult microsystem carry the youth’s voice and vision into exosystems, which included an adolescent mental health task force comprised of adults, as well as the adult governance bodies of the organizations that adopted the HOPE model We argue that this form of boundary spanning allowed young people’s visions to take root in the community and permitted their ideas and knowledge to affect the community problem of youth’s access to mental health services. We conclude that when adults are able to take what they gain in the YAP and move into adult spaces, long-term community change can occur
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