Durham Youth Listening Project

READ THE YOUTH LISTENING PROJECT REPORT!

Project Background

In late 2019, we launched the Durham Youth Listening Project. We set out to hear from Durham’s young people about their needs and dreams, and about what they think about the resources in their communities. We wanted to understand what was and wasn’t working about Durham’s youth services and programs. We knew this would help us set some priorities about the most important things to work on in the Office on Youth. The project could also help guide the work of anyone working to advocate for and support young people in Durham.

We worked in partnership with our youth ambassadors, community partners, and project consultants to do community outreach and host many listening sessions. We spoke with hundreds of young people, their caregivers, and people who work with and support youth.

The project prioritized the voices of: youth of color; LGBTQ+ youth; immigrant/migrant youth; youth who are not working and not in school; and youth who have experienced economic hardships, houselessness, and interactions with law enforcement.

We took all we heard and wrote a report with recommendations and have been working to make those come to life ever since. We are so excited to share the final report with you and look forward to working with you to make the recommendations a reality!

The findings have helped us set priorities as an office, and we’ve been working with other City and County departments and community partners on many of the recommendations. We know as an office we can’t address every recommendation, and want to support group conversations and advocacy work around recommendations that the community is excited about.

Check out these initiatives we launched in direct response to what we heard in the project:

Check out these initiatives we've been proud partners of:



STAY CONNECTED

Stay connected with us as we roll out other information and ways to engage in the recommendations: