Empowerment-focused positive youth development programming for underprivileged youth in the Southern U.S.: A qualitative evaluation

Positive Youth Development (PYD) programs seek to empower youth to act as change agents in their communities and enhance life skills and developmental outcomes. While vast literature exists on PYD programming, few are specific to empowerment programming in the South. Ethnic minority youth in underprivileged areas are more prominent in the South and are more likely to attend out-of-school time programming. Compared to affluent, White youth, minorities are more likely to live in at-risk neighborhoods and have lower achievement levels and educational outcomes that negatively affect adulthood, limiting social mobility and the ability to participate in society. To reduce inequality in achievement outcomes and to increase societal participation of minorities, it is critical to provide empowerment programming that follows empirically supported criteria to underserved youth in the South. Empowerment programming has been shown to positively impact behavior, development, and community contribution. In this qualitative study, the authors explored whether the experiences, perceptions, and perceived benefits voiced by minority youth empowerment programming participants (ages 7–19) in a southern school district and their caregivers demonstrated evidence of the empirical concepts of PYD (the Five C’s and the Big Three) that purport to positively impact behavior, development, and community contribution. Focus group data was collected from youth that participated in one or more of three empowerment programs during 2017–2019 and from a caregiver of each youth. Thematic analysis revealed constant presence of PYD empirical concepts in programming. Of those concepts, competence and life skill development, part of the Five C’s of PYD, emerged as the two dominant themes in youth and caregiver data. Competence was broken into categories of social, emotional, behavioral, moral, and cognitive. Social competence was the highest regarded competence (43% of competence codes for youth; 71% for caregivers). Implications are discussed. Importantly, disadvantaged youth in this region can be empowered through out-of-school time empowerment programming by developing their life skills and deepening their social competence, thereby reducing the likelihood of negative outcomes and promoting societal participation.