Building the Table: Inside the Family and Youth Advocacy Council
02/19/2026A new council is preparing Hope Zone families and youth to lead in real-time for the decisions that shape their neighborhood.
In community development, we talk a lot about “resident voice.” We put it in grant applications, strategic plans, and logic models. But there’s a real difference between collecting input and building the conditions for residents to actually lead, walk into a room with decision-makers and hold their own.
That’s the gap the Family and Youth Advocacy Council is designed to close.
Led by our Hope Zone team, the council is a structured leadership development initiative for families and young people in Northwest Dayton. It’s not a feedback mechanism or an advisory board in the traditional sense. It’s an intentional pipeline that moves residents from lived experience to trained advocacy to real influence over neighborhood decisions.
Where This Started
The council was born from the work itself.
Over time, our residents identified specific policy priorities through their participation in Hope Zone work groups. And a natural question followed, “Who better to lead these priorities than the people who have lived them?”
We knew we wanted to create a space where community members could directly lead our advocacy work. What we needed was the right structure. That opportunity came through a partnership with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, through EDU A314/SUP 426: Collaborative Action for Children. As part of the course, a team of graduate students took on a capstone project to research and recommend what a two-generation Family and Youth Advocacy Council could look like.
Their report offered a clear framework for designing the council across age groups, outlining the training and support members would need, and connecting the council’s work to broader systems change. It became a foundational reference point that informed the structure we ultimately built.
Built on What’s Already Working
Resident engagement has been part of how we operate for a long time. As a federally designated Promise Neighborhood, the Hope Zone reflects years of place-based work where resident input has been woven into how programs are designed, how partnerships are structured, and how progress is measured.
The numbers tell that story clearly. Across 17 Hope Zone neighborhoods, we engage an average of 163 participants through monthly community work groups, and 65% of those participants are residents, not staff or outside stakeholders. That’s a resident-majority table, built into the operating model.
The council builds on that foundation by going further. Rather than asking residents to respond to decisions that have already been framed, it prepares them to participate in the framing itself. The Council will understand systems, articulate priorities, and engage directly with partners and institutions from a position of preparation, not just proximity.
Why Families and Youth Together
One of the council’s most distinctive features is its intergenerational design. Adults and high school juniors and seniors sit at the same table, train together, and collaborate on real projects.
There’s a practical logic to this. Adults bring institutional knowledge, relationships, and the kind of pattern recognition that comes from years of navigating local systems. Young people bring urgency and a willingness to ask the questions that more seasoned community members have sometimes stopped asking. When those perspectives work together in the same room on the same project, the advocacy that comes out of it tends to be both grounded and forward-looking.
We already have a foundation here: 21% of resident participants in Hope Zone work groups are under 18. Young people are already showing up. The council gives them a more structured path to turn that participation into leadership.
The research supports what practitioners already know intuitively. Youth who participate in structured leadership development show stronger communication skills, higher civic engagement over time, and a deeper sense of belonging in their communities. Families who are brought into shared decision-making as collaborators help build trust between institutions and neighborhoods. The solutions that result tend to be more responsive and more durable.
The council is also developing a bridge. Youth who go through this process carry those skills into college, careers, and future civic engagement. That’s a long-term return on a community investment.
How It Works
The council is designed to support residents with real expectations and support.
Council members participate in a mandatory three-month leadership and advocacy training built into the regular meeting schedule. From there, they engage in monthly sessions, contribute to public speaking and community engagement opportunities (including events like the State of the Hope Zone and the Youth for Peace March), and collaborate on a hands-on outreach strategy project.
We compensate members for meetings and training and provide a flat rate for additional speaking engagements. Meals are provided at every meeting, and members receive ongoing professional development in leadership, advocacy, and organizing.
That compensation structure is intentional. Asking residents to lead without resourcing their time is one of the fastest ways to lose trust and burn out the very people who are centered in this work.
What Members Are Already Telling Us
The council is only two meetings in as of February, but early interviews with members are reinforcing what we hoped this initiative would create.
Both adults and youth have expressed that what drew them to the council was the opportunity to have a real voice in decisions that affect their community, particularly around issues they care about most: community safety, education, and healthcare. For the adults, it’s a chance to move from observing decisions to actively shaping them. For the youth, it’s something more personal.
Several of our younger members came to the council with experience in RE-LITE, a Hope Zone youth initiative that provides safe, structured evening programming for teens in partnership with local faith institutions. That experience gave them a reference point for what meaningful participation feels like, and it’s part of why they showed up here.
They aren’t just looking for a seat at the table. They’re looking for a table where what they say actually matters. That kind of expectation from young people is a signal worth paying attention to. When youth arrive already believing their voice should carry weight, the job shifts from convincing them to participate to making sure the structure is worthy of what they bring.
The First Project: Community Safety and Youth Rights
The council is hitting the ground running. Its first initiative, the Community Safety and Youth Rights Initiative, puts members directly into facilitation and advocacy roles from the start.
Council members will facilitate focus groups with community residents to collect feedback and develop recommended strategies for addressing community violence. They’ll host Know Your Rights forums for teenagers at Thurgood Marshall High School, Edwin Joel Brown Middle School, other youth-serving organizations, and with youth engaged in the juvenile justice system. The initiative will culminate in a mediation and conflict resolution seminar.
From those focus groups and forums, council members will produce a policy brief and digital toolkit to share with the City Commissioner and Hope Zone Work Group members.
That’s worth sitting with for a moment. The council’s first deliverable is a set of resident-created tools designed to inform real policy conversations, built by the people closest to the issues.
What This Means for the Broader Ecosystem
For partners and funders who work alongside us, the council represents something worth supporting. Not because the concept of resident leadership is new, but because the infrastructure behind it is specific and replicable.
When residents are prepared to engage, not just invited, the quality of institutional decision-making improves. Partners align around priorities that reflect lived realities rather than assumptions. Feedback loops tighten. And the kind of trust that takes years to build through programming can accelerate when communities see their own people in positions of genuine influence.
We don’t do this work in isolation. The Hope Zone operates alongside 40 partners, including financial institutions, community-based organizations, schools, and businesses, building coordinated and resident-led systems that support long-term stability and opportunity. The Family and Youth Advocacy Council adds a new layer to that coordination by ensuring the residents at the center of those systems are equipped to help steer them.
We see this as an extension of a model we’ve been refining for years. One where community development means developing the people, not just the programs.
Looking Ahead
As the first cohort moves through training and into their Community Safety and Youth Rights Initiative, we’ll be sharing more, including stories from members, insights from the process, and outcomes as they develop.
By the end of this cohort, a group of Hope Zone residents will have facilitated community focus groups, led Know Your Rights forums across multiple schools, and delivered a policy brief to the City Commissioner. This is the beginning of something we plan to sustain and grow, not a one-cohort experiment but a permanent piece of how we do community development in the Hope Zone. Over time, we are excited to see how our participants take their experiences to other city-wide leadership opportunities like the Neighborhood Leadership Institute, school boards, and city councils.
For organizations interested in learning more about the council or exploring partnership opportunities, contact Tracy Sibbing at Tracy.Sibbing@omegacdc.org. The first cohort is currently open to Hope Zone residents: adults living within the 45405 and 45406 zip codes and high school juniors and seniors interested in building leadership and advocacy skills.
