Creating impactful changes through community led improvements
The practices we promote as a professional, organization, or community can positively impact the lives and experiences of youth around us. Last October, the HOPE National Resource Center, in partnership with the Boys & Girls Club of Monmouth County and Garden State Equality, published a paper, “Improving Peer Relationships Through Positive Deviance Practices and the HOPE (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences) Framework,” in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. This paper demonstrates a novel use of the Positive Deviance approach in a community-based setting.
Leadership at the Boys & Girls Club of Asbury Park in New Jersey saw a need to improve relationships among youths at the club and increase their access to positive childhood experiences (PCEs). They wanted to use a Positive Deviance (PD) approach to identify existing practices that promoted PCEs and strong peer-to-peer relationships. Through focus groups and interviews, we found when guided by the HOPE framework, the PD approach is a promising strategy to create impactful changes for youth and increase access to PCEs in a community-based setting.
What is Positive Deviance, and how can it improve peer relationships
Positive Deviance is an approach where solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems experienced by the community are found within the community itself. For this project, the PD approach was used to identify staff members who were already engaging in practices that promoted PCEs and encouraged positive peer-to-peer relationships. Through focus groups with staff and members, the research team was able to identify several staff members whose practices de-escalated peer-to-peer conflict and promoted positive relationships and PCEs. These staff members are called the Positive Deviants (PDs).
Once the PDs and their practices were identified, the practices are shared throughout the whole organization. Each of the identified PDs led role playing activities during their all-staff trainings, sharing details about their practice and demonstrating what it looks like with other staff members. Through this project, the Boys & Girls Club of Asbury Park made changes to not just widely used practices with members, but changed how staff members connect and communicate, and made organizational policy changes as well that led to improved experiences for both club staff and their members.
Using the Four Building Blocks of HOPE to measure needs and success
The Four Building Blocks of HOPE, or keys types of PCEs that made up the HOPE framework, were used to understand what and how PCEs were being experienced by the members, where there were gaps, and to identify the PDs and their practices that promoted access to the Building Blocks. Practices that promoted the Building Block of relationships included doing member check-ins when they come in and spending time with them one-on-one to hear about their day or if they seem sad. For the Building Block of engagement, staff members promoted leadership and a sense of responsibility among club members by assigning them jobs and creating more opportunities to lead a club or share their opinion about programming. They also made changes to how conflict was de-escalated. Staff members now work with the club members to understand the origin of the conflict, hear each side of the story, and not immediately assign a disciplinary action. Staff members also saw increased moments of members resolving conflict by themselves using the new de-escalation tools.
Spreading the HOPE framework with what is already going well
The HOPE framework aligns well with the PD approach because they both draw on the community to find solutions and celebrate what is going well. Both the staff and members of The Boys & Girls Club of Asbury Park shared that they are seeing positive changes to peer relationships among club members, and they felt more confident and empowered as they saw themselves as part of the solution.
