Published in Children’s Voice, Volume 33, Number 2
By Aakanksha Sinha, Connie Chung, and Teresa Vollert
Our rapidly changing and volatile social, political, and cultural landscape has caused significant shifts in how we can best prepare young people for a complex world. The use of co-design approaches— also known as “participatory design”—to develop life skills can help both social workers and young people examine their current needs and co-develop skills necessary to lead an independent life. Currently, independent life skill assessments are the most common method used by child welfare agencies to identify strengths, skills, and areas of growth in preparation for youth’s transition to adulthood. To ensure that these assessments truly identify the skills that youth need and to acknowledge the context within which they live, it is imperative to include youth in the process of developing and implementing them.
The Casey Life Skills Assessment
The Casey Life Skills Assessment (CLSA) was launched by Casey Family Programs in 1998. While the CLSA has gone through several iterations, its values of collaborative design and integration of youth voice have remained central. The most recent redesign of the CLSA was completed in 2021 to address the skills that are required by youth in the 21st century and to integrate a diversity, equity and inclusion lens into the assessment. A core group of foster care alumni, resource and birth parents, independent life skill workers, and child welfare researchers were actively engaged in the redesign process. Youth of color highlighted the importance of contextualizing life skills within systemic inequities experienced by historically marginalized communities. Additionally, they highlighted the importance of integrating strengths-based perspectives into the assessment and augmenting the assessment to adhere to different learning styles, including concise and fewer questions, creating a safe space for discussions, encouraging ongoing mentoring, and using technology to access resources for continued learning.
For young people, how the CLSA is implemented can lead to the acquisition of the very life skills that the assessment aims to help them achieve. For example, research about effective youth engagement in school shows that creating opportunities for young people to express their thoughts and influence policies and practices is associated with development of life skills, communication skills, responsibility, self-esteem, sense of agency, democratic skills and citizenship, and student-adult relationships (Holquist, 2019; Mager & Nowark, 2012).
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Dr. Aakanksha Sinha is a Senior Director of Research at Casey Family Programs. In 2021 she led the effort to redesign the Casey Life Skills toolkit along with other members of the organization and lived experts to ensure that it integrated values of co-design, social justice and recognized the importance of addressing access to resources and social supports along with building independent life skills. Dr. Sinha has expertise in the area of community and equity focused program evaluation and research. Prior to working at Casey Family Programs, she was a tenure-track professor at Seattle University and has consulted for various national and international child and family well-being organizations.
Dr. Connie K. Chung is a former Foster America Fellow and a former resource parent. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Foster Care Project. A former teacher, the former associate director of Harvard Global Education Innovation Initiative, and author of several published works about how to prepare our young people to thrive in a rapidly changing world, she works as a consultant to policymakers, funders, and practitioners.
Teresa Vollert is an artist and peer advocate currently finishing her undergraduate studies at California State University, East Bay, majoring in human development and psychology. Teresa also works as a Peer Ambassador at Edgewood Center for Children and Families, supporting and empowering young individuals navigating challenges. Drawing from her own life experiences, Teresa has contributed to the design of an app tailored for youth in foster care and has passionately advocated for youth currently and formerly in care through her mural creations.