From Tijuana to Baltimore: The case for cross-border learning

This piece was written by Shannon McGarry, Program Director-U.S., International Youth Foundation. For more like this, see our public health newsfeed.

Baltimore has one of the highest populations of “disconnected youth” in the United States — one in five of the city’s young people are not in school, training, or work. Globally, the problem is even more dire, with one third of the world's 1.8 billion youth, ages 10 to 24, neither employed, nor in education or training.

Promising solutions exist. However, good ideas and proven approaches too often stay confined within geographic and sector-specific boundaries. In the face of this mounting global challenge, we cannot afford to problem-solve in isolation. Rather, we need to break down boundaries, step across borders and share knowledge to find the innovative, hybrid solutions this challenge demands.

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Three years ago, the International Youth Foundation launched the (Re)Connecting Youth initiative. We paired three municipal agencies in Baltimore — the Health Department, the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development and the Public School System’s Re-engagement Centre— with Fronteras Pro Salud, A.C., a civil society organisation with a 25-year history of supporting the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations in and around Tijuana, Mexico.

Through its Órale program, Pro Salud offers a highly-interactive methodology combining soft skills instruction, reproductive health education, employability training and job placement services — all delivered through a peer-to-peer approach.

We wondered: could Órale’s highly-effective, youth-driven strategy work in Baltimore?

“Too often in the US we think we have all the answers”

To find out, IYF facilitated virtual and in-person meetings among exchange participants, allowing each to learn from and share with their global partners. In addition, Pro Salud members trained youth and staff from Baltimore agencies to deliver an adapted version of the Órale model. Then, the Órale curriculum was piloted with 50-plus young women and men.

The results exceeded our expectations. Ninety percent of young people reported that they acquired new knowledge on sexual and reproductive health, gained confidence in their ability to make healthy decisions, and improved key communication and employability skills.

Moreover, Baltimore agencies gained fresh insights, tools and approaches for engaging young people as part of the solution. Based on these results, the city agencies plan to integrate the curriculum into ongoing programs for out-of-school youth and those at-risk of dropping out. Discussions are also underway with the aim of incorporating the model into summer programs serving Latino youth.

Despite this success, though, cross-border knowledge exchange is not without its challenges. We gleaned four important lessons along the way.

Relationship building takes time. In this case, the exchange process took 16 months and required a combination of site visits and virtual meetings. The investment in time and travel was critical for gaining buy-in from leadership and for allowing staff adequate time to learn the model and test the concept.

Upfront work pays dividends. We invested significant time and effort on the front-end in documenting Órale’s approach. This involved interviewing staff, translating the curriculum and examining impact data to ensure that pilots would be relevant and uphold the integrity of the model. Before you begin adaptation, be sure to analyse and understand the integral components of the approach or policy.

Different contexts may require adaptation. Certain elements of Pro Salud’s approach — e.g. the peer coaching and follow-up support provided in Tijuana  —were not currently feasible in Baltimore, making it necessary to modify program delivery. In the end, the goal isn’t merely replication — it’s the cross-pollination of ideas and learning when and why adaptation is necessary.

Be on the lookout for culturally appropriate adaptations. Órale serves youth with similar challenges to those in Baltimore and does so with curricula and tools that are readily adaptable to a local cultural context. It is not one-size fits all. The approach adapted for African American youth at the Westside YO Center looked slightly different than the adaptation for Latino youth served by the health department.

For youth-serving agencies in Baltimore, cross-border knowledge exchange sparked new ways of looking at a critical problem, offering an innovative approach that is both holistic and youth-led. Similar exchanges carried out in New Orleans and Nebraska reinforce the value of cross-border learning in creating onramps to economic opportunity and empowering young people to pursue productive futures.

In the words of one of our exchange partners: “Too often in the US we think we have all the answers.” The truth is, we don’t know what we don’t know until we set out — with intention — to see how others are tackling shared problems. — Shannon McGarry

(Picture credit: Flickr/Yianni Mathioudakis)