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For Families and Youth

Law Under Curious Minds: Youth Advocates Virtual Program

The Empowering Counseling Program provides free supportive after school and summer social services for marginalized youth of color, responding to structural oppressions by engaging youth and community members in participatory action programming and research. The ECP has served over 750 youth in Chicago in 14 years, achieving 90% youth engagement by co-designing services with youth and building capacity with community partners (schools, social service organizations, and churches) on Chicago’s South and West sides.1 Since 2017, the ECP has facilitated Law Under Curious Minds (LUCM), a human rights-based after school and summer program. LUCM utilizes critical participatory action research and critical civic inquiry (Torre et al., 2012; Hipolito-Delgado & Zion, 2017) to build resistance and resilience against structural oppression in marginalized youth. Additionally, ECP MSW interns provide humanistic-based individual and group mental health support services throughout programming.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early Spring 2020, the ECP transitioned all programming from in-person to virtual instruction. In response, ECP re-designed programming to respond to and mitigate the disproportionately toxic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic for marginalized Black and Latinx communities. Youth participants indicated a desire to be change-makers and to help their communities. Thus, ECP and LUCM engage youth in a critical public investigation, in which youth and staff work as full partners in a participatory research process designed to investigate and identify pragmatic solutions to problems identified by the youth. LUCM Youth Advocates is grounded in the following youth-led participatory action research (YPAR) principles, (1) Inquiry-based: topics of investigation are grounded in young people’s life experiences and concerns; (2) Participatory: young people share power with adults in making decisions about their project; and (3) Transformative: the purpose is to improve the lives of marginalized youth and their communities (Rodriguez & Brown, 2009). Through this critical public investigation process, youth create presentations and educational materials to advance social justice and human rights, in relation to the problem that they have identified and present this information to community members and policymakers in a community forum.