Youth-Adult Partnership
A way of working where young people and adults share power, learn from each other and make decisions together.
Youth-adult partnership research and practice field
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- designing youth boards and advisory groups
- improving shared decision-making
- training adults to support without taking over
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Which decisions are genuinely shared?
- What support do young people need to participate confidently?
- What do adults need to unlearn or change?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Youth-Adult Partnership as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- partnership requires preparation on both sides
- adult timelines and jargon can quietly dominate
- young people should see what changed because of their input