brokering | Hive Research Lab

We’re excited to announce the release of Brokering Youth Pathways: A toolkit for connecting youth to future opportunity. The result of two years of collaborative research and design with members of the Hive NYC Learning Network and with support from the Spencer Foundation, Brokering Youth Pathways was created to share tools and techniques around the youth development practice of “brokering”, or connecting youth to future learning opportunities and resources.

The toolkit shares ways that various out-of-school educators and professionals have approached the challenge of brokering. We provide a framework, practice briefs and reports that focus on a range of issues and challenges related to connecting youth to opportunity.

For instance, many youth development organizations, especially those with a tech focus, are interested in connecting youth to internships. But we know that the tech sector hasn’t always been great at inclusion of youth from disinvested communities, so how can we identify an organization that would be a good internship site? We co-wrote up a brief based on research we did with Scope of Work on this, and share four characteristics to look at in potential internship sites – their mission, staff diversity and cultural competency, a youth development orientation, and a positive workplace “vibe”, as youth in our study called it.

What about if you’re a teaching artist working in a classroom for just a couple of weeks, but want youth to be able to know what kinds of institution and opportunities you might be able to connect them to? Our brief on the topic, based on work with Beam Center, gives tips on doing this, like making sure your staff have an internal understanding of what pathway opportunities your organization can offer.

Do you engage youth in things like one day hack jams or maker events, and want to think about how help them stay engaged in making practices? It’s harder than it sounds. You can read a design case we co-wrote with Mouse about the challenges associated with supporting youth to “keep making” after they leave an event.

We also highlight the results of longitudinal research we conducted with youth, which looked at the phenomenon of “interest signaling”. Interest signalling includes practices, intentional or not, that result in educators and other adults giving youth support around their interests, including brokering new learning experiences. As simple as asking for a business card or as complex as maintaining a social media presence, we highlight interest signaling as a critical factor in brokering future learning, exploring how it plays out for youth with different levels of interest, and different orientations towards help-seeking.

Whether you’re an on-the-ground educator, an organizational leader, a researcher or just someone invested in the question of how youth get connected to learning opportunities and build social capital, we hope you find something useful in this toolkit.

In the summer of 2014, Hive Research Lab facilitated a design charrette focused on supporting youth interest-driven learning trajectories in the Hive. As part of the preparation for the meeting, members were asked to provide illustrative examples of what successful pathways or trajectories looked like on the ground. From the extraordinarily rich stories that members provided emerged our latest publication, a community-developed white paper entitled: On-ramps, Lane Changes, Detours and Destinations: Building Connected Learning Pathways in Hive NYC through Brokering Future Learning Opportunities.

This paper [pdf, exec sum, handout] makes a strong case for the importance of brokering as a key strategy for supporting youths’ interests in sustained and robust ways. Brokering (1) connects youth to meaningful future learning opportunities including events, programs, internships, individuals, and institutions that will support their ongoing interest-driven learning; and (2) enriches youth social networks with adults and peers that are connected to or have knowledge of future learning opportunities. The paper emphasizes that the Hive NYC community—with its robust social network of educators and professionals—represents an impressive cache of human and social capital that could be leveraged more fully through brokering.

Challenges to brokering are discussed as well, including how a young person’s network orientation or help-seeking orientation may affect her ability to take up and navigate the opportunities brokered by high resource individuals. Several recommendations targeted towards individual organizations and the network are offered as generative starting points for thinking about ways to extend the impact of brokering.

We wish to thank the 70+ individuals (named in the Appendix) who engaged in the collaborative sensemaking discussions, reflective conversations, and feedback-giving that resulted in this paper. We hope this collective effort felt of value to all who participated and that HRL, as facilitators of the process, was able to capture adequately the thinking and expertise of the community.

And of course, we look forward to more conversations and collective knowledge building around this core youth development practice!