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 address unexpected costs, food, and transportation, help reduce external stresses and demonstrate to youth that they are valued.
Wellbeing
Accessible, culturally-affirming, infrastructure and care guidance that promotes wellbeing, helps people traverse many experiences and allows them to better know themselves.
Building Skills
Community-based education and skill-sharing relationships that help young people discover, develop and celebrate their talents, interests, and inherent brilliance. Showing youth the community’s investment in them.
Intergenerational Connection
Regular interactions and learning across generations that build a sense of care with certainty. Asserting that “all youth are our youth” and helps youth and adults feel accountable to one another.
Space
Third spaces – both virtual and physical – that are co-developed with intentional location selection, thoughtful design, and affirming resources and messaging where youth feel fully understood and celebrated.
Safeness
More than just the absence of threats, it is the relationships and environments that 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.
AHSHAY's Belonging Framework
Project Updates
