Learning and Leading: A Toolkit for Youth Development and Civic Activism

Resource Description

The Learning and Leading Toolkit is published by the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, a nonprofit organization that supports civic youth engagement.

The Toolkit’s content draws from the experiences and lessons learned throughout the Organization’s three-year Youth Leadership for Development Initiative (YLDI), which supported 12 organizations’ activities in civic activism for youth development. The Toolkit looks specifically at ways to build youth leadership, which it views as the key link between civic activism and youth development.

The Toolkit is further broken down by Personal Leadership, or identity formation, Organizational Leadership, or the role of young people as decision makers, and Community Leadership, where youth organize for community change. The three distinct types of youth leadership are presented as a mutually-reinforcing set of conditions.

The Toolkit is designed with practitioners in mind and each of the three leadership sections includes a description of key concepts, "Promising Practices", checklists, resources and activities for actual workshops, and case studies and practical lessons learned from YLDI project participants.