This past Tuesday, the Youth Action Team (YAT) gave their final presentation on “How can predominantly white sports be more inclusive of and welcoming to youth of color?” The presentation showcased a youth-led participatory action research project (YPAR) they conducted and recommendations they created – work that spanned two years.
YPAR was an integral pathway for YAT members to learn about gaps and barriers in how youth of color access certain sports because it allowed members to:
- Decide what they wanted to study
- Design the research methods
- Develop interview guides and conduct interviews
- Disseminate surveys
- Gather quantitative and qualitative data
Even more impressive is the youth members were able to use their research results and create recommendations on how to make white-dominated sports more inclusive of and welcoming to youth of color. How did they do this, you might ask? They borrowed a framework from Common Goal that focused on gender equity and used it to increase racial equity. The framework follows three areas in which organizations can increase equity: on the field (how can players feel safe, supported and included), on the sideline (how can we increase diversity of coaches and support coach development), and in the organizations (how can an organization improves its capabilities and capacity to increase equity structurally and in its leadership?).
You can check the youth’s recommendations here! Several of these recommendations are being used by one of our adult action teams – the Shared Learning Action Team who are also focused on increasing racial equity in their programming!
The YAT also created a social media toolkit for the public to use, as another resource to spread awareness of play equity. You can access that here!
We are SO PROUD and grateful for our Youth Action Team. They are a group of incredible leaders, not only in our work, but for the King County region and beyond.
KCPEC is excited for the next years to come, to see more young people engage in the play equity mission and to see leaders come out of the woodwork!
Lastly, we want to thank the communities and families that encourage them, the Mariners for their continued investments in youth leadership, and for our organizational members that have supported and witnessed their growth.