With summer here, many kids are participating in camps, summer programs, and other activities. These spaces are great places for young people to build new friendships with peers and strong developmental relationships with adults.

For the past several years, Search Institute has been partnering with the Student Conservation Association (SCA). SCA is a nonprofit organization that recruits hundreds of youth and young adults annually to participate in programs focused on protecting and restoring natural and cultural resources. In these programs, youth spend their days rebuilding trails, restoring habitats, and engaging in a range of other conservation projects. The purpose of this partnership is twofold: to document the program’s impact on key developmental outcomes for participants (including social-emotional competencies and other indicators of thriving), and to understand what program experiences are most important to producing those outcomes.

The results illustrated in this infographic show what we learned about the potentially transformative power of relationships youth form with adults during these kinds of summer activities.

Find out more about how your program can get intentional about building developmental relationships this summer through our Developmental Relationships and Igniting Sparks workshops.

Click here for a pdf version of the infographic…

To learn more about our partnership with SCA, check out this research brief.
To learn more about SCA, visit their website at: www.thesca.org