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Social Movements and Governing Power

Building Healthy Communities Youth Programming and Participants’ Developmental Outcomes

By Veronica Terriquez, Jiayi Xu, and Marlen Reyes

As part of the ten-year Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative, The California Endowment (TCE) has invested heavily in youth-serving organizations to improve community health and well-being. Serving young people in high-poverty neighborhoods, these organizations offer a range of programming that aims to enhance members’ capacity to contribute to their communities and succeed and thrive as individuals. Notably, TCE’s investments over the course of the 2010s resulted in many significant youth-led policy victories that improved health in the targeted communities and contributed to youth development. This report delves into BHC youth programs fostering healthy development.

It compares developmental outcomes—specifically civic, educational, employment, and health outcomes—within two broad types of youth-serving organizations affiliated with the BHC initiative. The first type consists of youth organizing groups that focus on engaging young people in leading policy change and/or civic engagement campaigns. The second consists of youth leadership groups, which enable young people to have a voice in their communities and work toward common goals and interests but do not necessarily involve them in the various stages of policy change efforts. In this report, we examine developmental outcomes among a cohort of BHC organizing and leadership group BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) members who were surveyed in 2014 as adolescents and then surveyed again in 2019 as young adults.

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BHC Youth Programming Outcomes

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    In 2020, the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) merged to form the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI).

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