Youth Empowerment in Action seeks to:
Youth Empowerment in Action is a program at the Center for Character & Citizenship (CCC) in the College of Education at the University of Missouri- St. Louis.
The CCC’s approach to helping youth live healthy lives involves promoting the development of autonomy, belonging, and competence. Our team regularly collaborates with K-12 schools and districts on the effective implementation and evaluation of character and health education programs. In 2005 the CCC initiated the Youth Empowerment in Action (YEA!) Program. YEA! includes a series of school-community partnerships in positive youth development, including : 1) YEA! TEAM (Tobacco Education, Advocacy, and Media) involves youth in the promotion of tobacco free youth, and 2) YEA! Healthy and Active Communities which involves youth in the promotion of healthy and active lifestyles (prevention of childhood obesity). These projects aim to reduce the significant risk factor of commercial media consumption by strengthening the scientifically demonstrated protective factors of media literacy, service-learning, and civic engagement in the lives of underserved youth. Our model emphasizes the development of intrinsic values such as 1) self-acceptance and personal growth, 2) relatedness and close interpersonal relationships, 3) a strong sense of community and desire to contribute to its improvement, and 4) the promotion of health values.
We take an ecological perspective, implementing strategies that promote the “well-being” of the staff, students, families, and communities. The Center’s work with schools is situated at the intersection of developmental psychology, community psychology, and organizational psychology. See www.characterandcitizenship.org
The Center for Character and Citizenship generates and disseminates knowledge and research about how individuals develop moral and civic character and provides scholars, educators and organizations with the tools they need to contribute to this development. The Center is an organizational framework and collaborative venue for scholars and educators interested in character education for character development and democratic citizenship. The collaboration of UM-St. Louis faculty, students, visiting scholars and educational organizations brings together a range of interests and powerful expertise and resources to enhance, support and strengthen character and citizenship education at the local through international levels. The Center strives to help teachers, coaches, principals, superintendents and other educators increase their expertise in character and citizenship education, and also plans to offer separate graduate Certificate Programs in character education and citizenship education.
The CCC Directors Marvin Berkowitz and Wolfgang Althof and the CCC executive committee Melinda Bier, Vic Battistich, and Terry Jones have extensive experience working with government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. Affiliates of CCC have expertise in early childhood education, curriculum design and integration, physical education, health and sports, media literacy, production, and advocacy, critical thinking and literacy, teacher education and in-service professional development and leadership. One aspect of our most recent work focuses on researching and building media literacy, production, and advocacy (civic engagement) as protective factors in the lives of youth. Our research-based multi-component approach builds self and collective efficacy for health outcomes in administrators, teachers and students. The pedagogical approaches we bring together include professional learning communities and school leadership teams, peer to peer learning, service learning, new media production, as well as nationally recognized school-based evaluation expertise.
