Balancing Acts - Managing the Tensions Inherent in Long-Term Youth-Led Projects

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanford

Balancing Acts examines how Techbridge Girls, a U.S. nonprofit, designed and supported semesterlong community impact projects led by adolescents to sustain long-term engagement. It describes how staff used long-term, open-ended design work to foster problem solving, critical thinking, and youth agency within constraints such as weekly time, supply budgets, and staffing limits. The text outlines program staffing, matching coordinators and teachers, and highlights both benefits and implementation challenges of extended design experiences.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages7

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Balancing Acts

Managing Long-Term Youth-Led Projects

Project Work and Design Experiences

Research Context

Balancing Acts Managing the Tensions Inherent in Long-Term Youth-Led Projects Suzanne Eyerman and Sarah Hug The girls were really invested in the long-term projects; they liked working on it. It was hard that, for some of them, they didn’t get finished. It was hard, but you work on growth mindset, and you work on helping them thinking about [the community impact project] as a prototype. These words come from a staff member who works with a girls’ engineering afterschool program run by Techbridge Girls, a U.S. nonprofit. This staff interview was part ofa larger study of the organization’s expansion to provide engineering education to more girls. Techbridge Girls seeks to inspire girls to discover their passion for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), working to serve girls of color and girls in lower-income neighborhoods. Techbridge Girls has created and implemented STEM curricula in out-of-school settings for almost 20 years, funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and corporate giving. For many years, Techbridge Girls focused its weekly sessions on stand-alone lessons that asked participants to develop products that fulfilled specific criteria, such as “create the bounciest rubber ball,”“build the tallest paper tower,” or “design the largest bubbles.” These activities typically lasted one or two sessions. Recently, the organization became eager to expose participants to more comprehensive, and therefore lengthier, design experiences while also wanting to SUZANNE EYERMAN, PhD, director at Fairhaven Research and Evaluation, is a researcher and evaluator for STEM programs in higher education, K–12, and afterschool. A former teacher, she focuses on increasing the participation of women and people of color in STEM. She received her PhD in education from the University of Colorado, Boulder. SARAH HUG, PhD, director at Colorado Evaluation and Research Consulting, is a social scientist and program evaluator working on projects related to underrepresentation in STEM. She brings her background as a teacher of preschool, elementary, and homebound students to bear on her study of learning environments, in and out of school. She earned her PhD in education from University of Colorado, Boulder. keep the projects manageable for participants, program coordinators, and teachers. How could a larger design experience be implemented so that it would still fit into the two-hour weekly timeframe, the supply budget, and the program’s staffing restrictions? That is, how would Techbridge Girls manage the tensions inherent in implementing long-term projects with adolescents? This article explores how Techbridge Girls worked to stimulate long-term engagement and create opportunities for youth empowerment in semesterlong community impact projects. It shows how staff and organization leaders used these long-term design projects to give participants opportunities for problem solving, critical thinking, and youth agency. Project Work and Design Experiences Long-term, open-ended projects are beneficial for youth girls see STEM careers as a possibility. To accomplish this goal, the organization helps girls learn technical skills in STEM fields, gauge their interest in a variety of areas, and interact up close with professionals in STEM workplaces. Each middle school afterschool site is hosted by the participants’ school and staffed by a Techbridge Girls program coordinator and a teacher from the school. Program coordinators usually have expertise in youth development, teaching, engineering, social work, social activism, or some combination of these areas. Techbridge Girls works to match staff members with teachers whose skills complement eachother. For example, a staff member with social work expertise might be paired with a STEM teacher and a staff member with STEM knowledge with a literacy teacher. (Grant, 2002; Hauer & Daniels, 2008), but engaging Participants young people in such projects can

FAQs

What main challenge does the text identify for long-term youth-led projects?

It highlights the tensions in implementing long-term projects for adolescents while keeping them manageable within weekly time, supply budgets, and staffing restrictions.

Why does the organization consider long-term, open-ended projects beneficial for youth?

The text explains that these projects allow physical manipulation of materials, iterative cognitive work with regular reflection and redesign, and engagement through teamwork or paired participation.

How does Techbridge Girls structure staffing and support at each afterschool site?

Each middle school site is hosted by the participants’ school and staffed by a Techbridge Girls program coordinator plus a school teacher, with Techbridge Girls matching staff skills to complement the teachers’ expertise.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Stanford