Fortifying Futures for our Youth
We are convening partners to build the future we wish to see and live in.
Led by youth.
Co-designed by community.
Grounded in joy.
Aspiring towards hope.
The Fortifying Futures for Our Youth project brought together a multigenerational group of youth and adults with lived experience to co-create bold, community-rooted solutions to youth incarceration and youth experiencing unstable housing. Linked by proximity to these issues and guided by youth brilliance, participants envisioned a future where these harms are not just reduced, but rendered unimaginable.
Explore the roadmap we built together to make a just future possible for all youth. Read our Fortifying Futures Report: ahshaycenter.org/ffreport
Methodology
The project followed a responsive, relationship-centered methodology grounded in participatory design, youth-centered facilitation, and iterative feedback. Through five strategic phases—preparation, planning, convening, ideation, and refinement—participants engaged in creative exercises, storytelling, and collaborative decision-making. This approach fostered trust, belonging, and imagination, allowing participants to generate constellations of ideas spanning housing, education, wellness, and governance.
These ideas are now being developed into actionable and implementable strategies, laying the foundation for the next chapter of AHSHAY’s work and setting the stage for sustainable, community-driven impact.
Key Outcomes
- A belonging framework that serves as both a design principle and measurable outcome.
- A toolkit for community-based organizations to replicate inclusive, wellness-integrated project design.
- Launch of a prevention network called King County Youth Wellbeing, an initiative to scale youth-led, community-driven prevention strategies.
- A host of outgrowth efforts, including Storybook, Closure Convenings, Garfield Documentary, all under an overarching Narrative Strategies approach.
As part of the belonging framework, participants identified the following seven belonging domains:
Basic needs
Efforts that help satisfy life essetials like food, home and transportation, help reduce existential stresses and demonstrate to youth that they are valued.
Wellbeing
Accessible, culturally-affirming, infrastructure and ecosystem that promotes wellbeing, especially behavioral wellbeing, helps people traverse many experiences and allows them to better know themselves.
Building Skills
Expand learning through community-based education and skill-sharing relationships to help young people discover, develop and celebrate their talents and interests, while staying true to youth’s needs, voice and their inherent brilliance. In doing so, we show youth the community’s investment in them.
Intergenerational Connection
Regular interactions and learning across generations builds a sense of care with certainty that “all youth are our youth” and helps youth and adults feel accountable to one another.
Space
The codevelopment of spaces – both virtual and physical – thanks to strategic placement, aesthetic components, resources and messages, where youth feel fully understood and celebrated.
Safeness
Built and natural environments that engender a true sense of safeness – without promulgating false narratives about unsafety – allow youth to attend to their growth, take risks and know that the community cares about them.
Promoting Identity
The intentional celebration of youth’s identity, journeys, voice and culture in community helps them feel seen and appreciated.
Project Updates
