Evaluating the Impact of Youth Service

Under this initiative ICP is conducting research to build the youth service field and demonstrate how national youth service, service-learning, and other forms of civic engagement make a significant positive impact on youth and human development.

Through our work with key international organizations such as the World Bank, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNV, UNDP, Plan International, Save the Children, the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, ICP has worked to ensure that youth civic engagement is included in the broader youth development agenda.

Making the Case: Measuring the Impact of Youth Service

Youth service is a strategy implemented worldwide for national and youth development, and the increasing attention being given to this strategy highlights the need for widely available standard instruments to assess the impact of national youth service programs. To that end, Innovations in Civic Participation (ICP), in collaboration with numerous evaluation experts and youth service practitioners around the world, seeks to build the evidence base for the impact of youth service. ICP and an informal working group seek to do this through the development of several tools that do not exist at this point, including a conceptual framework, typology, overarching logic model and guiding principles of high quality youth service. This will facilitate high-level impact evaluation of national youth service programs and the establishment of national youth service as a proven effective model for national and youth development.

In May 2008, ICP and the World Bank's Children and Youth unit hosted an international experts meeting at the World Bank to identify gaps in the existing research on youth service and to develop a research agenda to move youth service from a "promising but unproven" to a "proven" strategy for development. In follow-up to that meeting, ICP is working with international experts to develop tools for high-quality impact evaluation of youth service programs to highlight the impact of youth service and encourage further investment in the field.

Click on the links below for more information:

Measuring the Impact of Youth Voluntary Service Programs: Summary and Conclusions of the International Experts' Meeting, May 2008

ICP's Collaboration with the World Bank

Details of the International Experts Meeting of May, 2008

Resources for Evaluating the Impact of Youth Service Programs

Discussion Forum
ICP invites all evaluation and youth service practitioners and experts to participate in a discussion forum surrounding techniques, tools, resources and other pertinent topics.