Youth Engagement Starts with Checking Your Privilege at the Door with Blanca Goetz and Kathleen Holt-Whyte

For more than twenty years, there has been a growing emphasis on youth engagement — inviting young people into the conversations and decisions about the systems that impact their lives. However, there are still fundamental skills that many people are developing that are grounded in working with people with lived experience as experts.

Today, we’re joined by two child welfare advocates who are focused on that question—particularly how shared decision-making can shape solutions that actually work. Blanca Goetz is a Jim Casey Fellow and youth advocate, and Kathleen Holt-Whyte is a senior youth engagement consultant with Cetera Inc.

Together, they helped develop the Elevating Youth Engagement, or EYE, curriculum. Developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in partnership with Cetera Inc., EYE builds on more than two decades of the Casey Foundation’s national leadership in authentic youth engagement. The curriculum brings together system leaders and young people to explore what meaningful partnership in improving outcomes for young people in foster care can look like.

This conversation explores what happens when systems move beyond simply including young people, and begin to consider what it takes for their perspectives to actually shape decisions.