Over the past 30 years, Juma has employed more than 11,000 young people with a goal of providing access to the tools, resources, and education they need to bridge the opportunity gap. In that time, both the world our young people exist in and the challenges they face have changed, so our program has also evolved to meet them where they’re at. Today, as we look to future iterations of our YouthConnect program, we’re building and strengthening avenues for youth voices to play a key role in shaping Juma’s future.

“Juma has always been a youth-led Social Enterprise,” explains Sanobar Sajan, Senior Director of Data Systems and Evaluation. “Our Alumni will tell you that they got exposure to what it means to supervise people at a very young age, when they were 17 and worked as cart leads and stand leads at Juma. But the ‘youth-led’ part has always been focused on the Enterprise side of Juma.”

Until now. Over the past three years, as we worked to meet the goals of our most recent strategic plan—which ultimately focused on deepening the impact we make for youth—we’ve sought out ways to bring youth voice into the next phase of our program development. 

Juma’s Learning and Evaluations team (LEV) has held several focus groups made up of Juma youth to learn more about their experiences at Juma. These conversations were guided by a member of the LEV team, with care taken to create a safe space for youth to share feedback, both positive and negative. The focus groups proved to be very useful tools for understanding youth perspectives on the Juma job and curriculum.

Another key goal in seeking youth feedback is the formalization of our alumni services. While alumni have frequently stayed connected to each other and sometimes to Juma staff they built a bond with during the program, we are in the early stages of creating a program to help foster these connections. In addition to creating clearer pathways for alumni to support one another long after their tenure with Juma, this newly revamped component of our YouthConnect program will offer us greater opportunities to seek feedback from former participants as they enter the job market and move into careers. Being able to seek feedback from youth months to years after their time in the program will provide valuable insight into the long-term benefits of Juma’s YouthConnect program and areas for potential growth.

While we have long used surveys developed by our LEV team to gather feedback from Juma youth, this year, for the first time, Kailey Ulland, Juma’s Associate Director of Data and Evaluations, created a newsletter to go out to Juma youth summarizing the findings of those surveys. The goal of closing this loop is to show the young people who invest their time in giving us feedback that their opinions and experiences matter and are, in fact, affecting real change.

“What we’ve been doing over the last 3 years and will continue to expand on is putting the youth voice at the center of everything from program design to measuring and defining impact because we believe in the power of young people and know that our job is to support their vision for their own futures,” concludes Sanobar. “That’s why we’re co-creating the Connect and Alumni programs with our young people. That’s why we’ve focused our evaluation efforts over the last 3 years on getting participant feedback. Because we understand that our youth are not just participants but partners in shaping what Juma is and what it could be.”