COVID-19 has altered the lives of Americans in many ways, affecting how we learn, work and socialize. At the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, the pandemic transformed how BCTR faculty and staff interact with communities and partners to enhance human development, health and well-being.
The BCTR is home to at least thirteen projects that work with collaborators to support healthy youth development, prevent teenage pregnancy, assist older adults with chronic pain, educate parents and more. Across the center, research associates and outreach specialists adopted new technologies and altered their strategies to continue to support people across the lifespan during the pandemic.
The Residential Childcare Project, or RCCP, offers a variety of programs to help improve the quality of residential childcare, especially for youth who have experienced trauma in their lives. When the lockdowns began in spring of 2020, the program pivoted to offer all of their trainings online.
The project also worked to support residential agencies in implementing infection control guidelines in ways that would help children to continue to feel supported, said Martha Jane Holden, the project’s director.
“Residential agencies had to implement CDC guidelines for staff and the children, have ways to quarantine any outbreaks and shut down any activities including children going home for weekends or parents coming to the agency to visit,” she said. “We provided a website with resources about how to adjust training to virtual platforms, as well as activities for staff and children. We also hosted a variety of forums to bring our agencies together to share resources and provide support for each other.”
4-H connects kids to communities
New York State 4-H is one of the largest outreach programs housed at the BCTR. The program engages 170,000 youth across New York in after-school programs, special interest groups, independent memberships, camps and special events to support positive youth development.
When schools and community centers closed last year, 4-H educators had to quickly shift to engaging with youth online. In Jefferson County, for example, a virtual 4-H afterschool academy now reaches more than 1,000 youth each day.
In many cases, the virtual programs involve youth learning about something online with an instructor, and then leaving the computer screen for their own hands-on projects or practice.
“It’s experimental in many ways,” said Andy Turner, New York State 4-H program leader. “There have been great innovations, and also challenges because young people are online so much for school that it’s tough to get them to come back to do more.”
At the national level, 4-H launched a new online learning site called 4-H at Home that offers a broad range of programs and projects for kids across the country. NYS 4-H Health, Wellness and Food System Specialist Mingla Charoenmuang is developing a module for the new website on Food System Sustainability. Earlier this year, she led a project called Agriculture Innovators Experience that trained 20 4-H teens from five counties in New York to deliver a virtual climate change program to third through sixth graders.
The trick, Turner explained, is to keep 4-H youth connected to adult mentors and youth peers despite limitations required by the pandemic.
“The role that positive adult mentors play is significant in helping youth feel safe and grounded,” he said. “Trying to find ways to keep them connected without worrying too much about the content is something we’ve learned from this experience.
“This is a lesson that goes beyond COVID,” he said. “We need to create a space where every young person feels comfortable and relaxed, and then you have greater impact in having them grow and try new things.”
Reaching kids virtually will likely be an element of 4-H that is here to stay, Turner said. “Going forward, we’ll probably have more of a hybrid approach,” he said. “Hands-on activity is the bread and butter of 4-H, but today’s young people really connect to activities online.”
ACT for Youth offers virtual training
ACT for Youth is also focused on connecting online. The project works with more than 60 agencies across New York State to support adolescent pregnancy prevention. “When the pandemic hit, all programming stopped and closed down,” said Jutta Dotterweich, ACT for Youth’s director of training and technical assistance.
ACT for Youth immediately reached out to its funder the New York State Department of Health to find out what resources and assistance agencies needed to continue to work with youth. They then planned weekly web training sessions on relevant topics including self-care, the best practices for working remotely and the best ways to reach out to youth virtually.
“Once we identified these topics, we were able to host webinars, work groups and consulting sessions with experts,” Dotterweich said. “We really diversified our web events and were able to engage providers much more actively.”
As the pandemic continued, ACT for Youth helped to develop educational and reproductive health messages to platforms used most frequently by today’s youth, such as TikTok, Discord and Instagram. In addition, ACT for Youth facilitated the adaptation of evidence-based prevention programs to virtual platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom.
“It was crucial that agencies be able to offer these evidence-based programs virtually,” she said. “We expanded our knowledge of e-tools, which we will continue to use moving forward, mostly thinking about creating more engaging web sessions and web resources.”
But, Dotterweich said, there are certain training elements ACT for Youth would conduct in person once it’s safe again. “It may be tempting to offer more training online since it eliminates travel, but in general we prefer in-person training for skill building,” she said.
