We looked for research on youth shaping communities: here's what we found—and didn't find.

This blog is part of the Afterschool Alliance's Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM & Society (CYESS) initiative, which showcases the systemic change young people can make in their communities when their afterschool programs support them to layer action onto their STEM learning. If you would like to know more or submit a blog about your youth action program, please contact us.

"Youth voice" has become one of the most energizing ideas in the afterschool field today. Walk into almost any quality afterschool program today and you'll hear about young people identifying problems in their communities, designing solutions, leading change, and advocating for issues they care about. The language of youth agency and empowerment is everywhere—and that's a good thing.

But here's a question worth sitting with: How much do we actually know about whether it is working?

This is a not a question about the youth themselves—there's plenty of research showing that youth-centered programs boost confidence, STEM identity, and a sense of agency. We mean something bigger: what happens to communities when young people are genuinely at the table? Do neighborhoods get healthier? Do problems get solved in new or better ways? Do communities benefit more when young people have a real voice in defining and addressing challenges?

We went looking for research that could answer those questions, and recently published our findings in a background paper, Examining the Research Landscape: What Existing Studies Reveal—and Omit—About Youth-Driven Afterschool STEM and Communities, that tells this story.

What the Literature Review Revealed

The paper reviews existing research on youth-led STEM initiatives in afterschool and out-of-school time (OST) settings—specifically programs where young people are tackling real-world problems they care about.

What we found is that the research landscape is genuinely promising but notably incomplete. Study after study documents the impact of youth-led STEM programs on young people: their growing confidence, stronger STEM identities, and increased sense of civic responsibility. These are meaningful outcomes and we should continue measuring them.

But the field has largely stopped there. Research that tracks what happens beyond the young person—to the community issue being tackled, to the systems those young people are trying to change—is rare. When it does exist, it's quite encouraging: youth have restored community spaces, shifted family behaviors around climate, advanced policy support for environmental protections, and even had their technology adopted by local government. For example, a group of girls in Argentina built a wildfire-tracking app their local fire department ultimately adopted because it was more effective than the one they were already using.

These stories are compelling. But they are outliers in the research, not the norm.

The Challenge of Measuring Community Impact

The paper also explores why this gap exists. Community-level change is hard to measure. It unfolds slowly, involves many actors, and rarely traces cleanly back to any one program or effort. Most afterschool programs don't have the resources or research partnerships to document systemic change over time—and even those that do find it genuinely difficult to capture.

We conducted interviews with two programs working at this intersection—Technovation and trubel&co—and both illustrate the challenge. Technovation, a global nonprofit with nearly two decades of history, has the longitudinal data to show that half of its alumnae report actively leading change in their communities years after participating. trubel&co, a newer program with deep commitment to civic impact, is still developing the tools to capture what its youth are doing at the community level. As founder Nick Okafor put it, "That next-level community impact is critical. We haven't found an answer yet as to how to fully measure that." 

That honest reflection from the field mirrors what we found in the literature.

Why This Matters—and What's Next

Youth voice in afterschool is more than a trend. Young people bring perspectives adults often don't have, and they are living right now in the communities we are all trying to improve. Decades of positive youth development research supports giving them meaningful roles, not tokenistic ones.

But to move youth voice from a "nice-to-have" to a "necessary-to-have," the field needs evidence. We need to be able to show decision-makers, funders, and communities that authentic youth engagement produces better outcomes—not just for young people, but for everyone.

That's exactly what we have set out to build. This background research directly informed a new, NSF-funded study now underway: Beyond Individual Impacts: Identifying Characteristics of Youth STEM Programs that Yield Community-Level Impacts (Grant No. DRL-2517238). Working with partners at the National Girls Collaborative, the University of Washington, and Public Profit, we are developing a framework that programs can use to document and demonstrate the broader community impacts of youth-led work.

We'll share more as the research progresses. In the meantime, read the full background paper and learn more about the new NSF project. And if your program is already doing this work—documenting the ways young people are shaping your community—we'd love to hear from you.