The Parent Complaint That Becomes a Lawsuit: Legal Exposure at Every Step
How a youth organization responds to a parent complaint about staff can determine its legal exposure. Here is what the law requires.
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When One Child Harms Another: Organizational Liability for Peer-to-Peer Abuse in Youth Programs
Many youth organizations have discovered the hard way that their child protection policies had a critical gap: they addressed what adults must not do to children but said nothing about what happens when one child harms another. That gap is not a minor oversight. Research, shows that more than 70% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated…
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What D-Day Can Teach Youth Serving Organizations About Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
At 4:15 in the morning on June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in a rain-lashed tent at Portsmouth and made one of the most consequential decisions in modern history. The weather over the English Channel was still miserable. His meteorologists offered a narrow window of improvement, not a guarantee. His commanders were divided….
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What “Evidence-Based” Actually Means: A Hard Look at the Research Influencing Youth Programs
We have long known about the replication crisis in social science research — the problem that few findings hold up in later studies. In April 2026, the largest replication project ever attempted found that only about half of the existing research holds up under further testing. This finding has profound implications for youth-serving organizations that want to follow evidence-based practices.
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The Cliff Is Real: How Youth Organizations Can Support Kids Aging Out of Foster Care
Saturday, May 31, is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. The observance exists because what happens to young people at the moment the system releases them is, by most measurable standards, a national failure. Approximately 20,000 youth age out of the U.S. foster care system each year. They leave without a permanent family,…
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The Adulting Gap: How Teaching Life Skills to Teens Can Be Part of Your Program’s Job
May 31 is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. Every year, approximately 20,000 young people reach the age of majority and exit the foster care system in the United States. They leave without a permanent family, without a home to return to after a hard week, and without the informal adult guidance that…
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When Your Youth Becomes Your Teen Employee
Every summer, youth-serving organizations across the country hire teenagers who spent the previous year as participants in their programs. A sixteen-year-old who aged out of the after-school mentoring program is now helping run the summer day camp. A high school junior who has attended your overnight program for four years is back this summer as…
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When the Background Checks Miss Something
In May 2025, Camp Cho-Yeh in Livingston, Texas ran what most administrators would consider a thorough background screening. Before hiring a new camp counselor, the organization used a vendor to search the Enhanced Nationwide Criminal database, the Department of Justice Sex Offender Registry, Social Security records, and county-level criminal records. All of it came back…
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Stable Relationships Are the Program: How YSO Staff Become Protective Factors
Staff turnover in youth-serving organizations runs as high as 40 percent per year. Most administrators treat this as an HR problem — a cost to manage, a vacancy to fill, a disruption to program continuity. The research says it is something more serious than that. For youth in your programs, particularly those such as foster…
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More Than a Safe Space: How Your Organization Can Support Foster Families
May is National Foster Care Month, a good time to think about how our youth organizations can help children in foster care. Not every organization is positioned to become a foster family, and we are not asking you to. But there is a wide space between becoming a foster parent and doing nothing at all,…
