Youth ChalleNGe Program
Overview
The AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) and the Department of Defense's National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program began their collaboration in 2009 as a way to assist one another with placement and leadership opportunities for disadvantaged and out-of-school youth serving in their programs. By providing these youth with transitional structures and supports, giving them a place to test and enhance their skills, and using their diversity of experiences to build peer-led and team-oriented environments, the collaboration has been able to achieve growing success and has been able to continue development through their best practices and lessons learned.
The collaboration structure includes
- Regular cross-organization communication and outreach, as well as sharing of status updates about youth’s progress
The collaboration’s best practices include
- Establishing buy-in from both sides
- Building relationships and involvement in each other’s activities
- Sharing information and feedback in order to make improvements
The collaboration has discovered it is important to
- Use appropriate language and sharing of information to establish new members’ buy-in and program growth.
View additional resources and information about the collaboration.
