Youth Engagement

Enhancing youth leadership skills is a key component in all of our youth work.

We provide workshops, technical assistance and training for youth, and the adults who support them. Our workshops for youth are co-facilitated by VISIONS Youth Consultants (ages 16-24), who are trained to teach youth peer leadership skills.

Youth services and resources currently offered include:
  • Customized workshops and programs for youth, as well as for adults who work with youth.
  • The Legacy Project, a summer employment and leadership skills training program.
  • YES! Kit, a printed training curriculum with DVD support available for purchase and use by adults and youth workers.
Talking about Race: This five minute clip offers guidelines for having conversations about race and other differences.

YES! Kit

The YES! KIT was designed for you.
Do you want to:
  • Increase respect, empathy, and appreciation of differences among your youth?
  • Empower your students with proven, practical strategies that promote teamwork and collaboration across differences?
  • Give young people the language and problem solving skills needed to discuss and address difficult issues?
  • Have youth be able to critically think about their internalized biases, assumptions and beliefs?
Youth Consultants
Youth Consultants facilitate a workshop.
The YES! Kit contains a 5 session training guide and 36-minute DVD.
YES! Kit Guide
The guide is divided into five distinct sessions that focus on each key element of the process of learning and change. With this tool, educators and youth workers can move youth from awareness to action, guided by topics such as recognizing varying forms of exclusion, understanding the impact of personal thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and translating new information and insights to the real world.

YES! Kit DVD
The DVD showcases youth in action at a Youth Engagement Strategies (YES) conference hosted by VISIONS and its partners. Within the three sections of the DVD, youth participants progress through a series of learning, change, and action oriented sessions and experiences, designed to empower them to challenge oppression in their communities.

1 YES! Kit: $150 + $2.95 S&H
3 YES! Kits: $100 each + $6 S&H
3 YES! Kits + Half-day Training: $1,000 + Free S&H – Please contact VISIONS for more information.

Legacy Project

The Legacy Project—a youth employment, training and empowerment program.
Each summer teens and young adults are given the opportunity to learn the VISIONS model and run community arts events focused around justice and equity. During the school year, participants continue their training in order to become youth consultants and maintain contact with a positive peer and adult community.

The program teaches young people how to be instruments of social change by empowering them to understand the root causes of systemic inequities, and equipping them with the skills necessary to be educators of other youth. Youth gain the ability to understand their current reality through a historical, economic, and psychological lens that takes into account the effect that such oppression has over time on individuals and communities.
Jamila Capitman, Founder of the VISIONS Legacy Project, explains the purpose and impact of the program.
Location and Funding
The  Legacy Project is run out of Boston, MA and Fresno, CA with the potential to be replicated in other parts of the US, depending on funding and local interest. Legacy is financially supported by both individuals and private and corporate foundations.

Youth Empowerment Workshops

VISIONS offers customized workshops to organizations and groups that want to engage youth around issues of diversity, inclusion and equity.

Our Youth Empowerment Workshops focus on both the personal and societal impacts of exclusion—based on race, gender, class, ethnicity and other factors—and empower youth to become catalysts for social change.

Both youth and the adults who work with them report that VISIONS training has:
  • Allowed youth and staff to share a common framework and language.
  • Interrupted the perpetuation of bias and “one-downing” of another group.
  • Increased young people’s self-confidence and their perception of themselves as leaders and allies.
  • Improved both youth and adults’ ability to deal with internal conflicts and collaborate more effectively.
  • Made both the organization and the youth more successful in achieving their social justice mission.
Jovonna Jones, a student at Emory University in Atlanta, was part of VISIONS’ Legacy Project. She now serves as a Youth Consultant and board member. Jovonna shares how VISIONS makes a difference in her life and in the world.
“Legacy has taught me new ways to deal with problems that I often run into at school when it comes to race and culture. I have also confronted my personal prejudices about certain groups, and extinguished those prejudices.”

— Aaron, Legacy Project participant
The Legacy Project Fresno
The Legacy Project Fresno