Engaging Marginalized Youth in Positive Development: The Changing Lives Program

Building effective Positive Youth Development (PYD) interventions for marginalized youth requires understanding what actions, experiences, and relationships—that is, what group processes—during the intervention promote positive outcomes in this population. This chapter examines group processes in the Changing Lives Program, a group-based PYD intervention designed to empower adolescents growing up in disempowering community contexts in Miami, Florida, USA. After describing the social and historical context for the program’s development, we outline the Changing Lives Program’s participatory transformative intervention model. We present narrative case histories to illustrate the group process issues involved in PYD group work with marginalized adolescents, and we examine adolescents’ session-by-session assessment of PYD group processes as a mediator of pre-to-posttest changes in positive development and mental health. Finally, we use these findings to discuss the importance of connecting group process with outcome in PYD intervention research.