Peace Corps Youth Clubs Toolkit

Created as part of the Peace Corps' Let Girls Learn programme, this toolkit provides guidance, checklists, and tools to support the implementation of youth clubs. Evidence shows that extended participation in high-quality clubs - organisations of young people with clear membership and youth leadership, which meet regularly to socialise and learn - correlates with youth well-being and improved outcomes in educational attainment, health, and civic engagement, as well as decreased risk behaviour.

The Peace Corps' approach to youth development and effective clubs reflects the following principles:

• Positive Youth Development (PYD): focuses on youths' strengths and opportunities for development rather than on things youth do wrong or issues that need to be solved.
• Asset-Based Approach: applies a framework of 40 developmental assets to measure youths' well-being and likelihood of success.
• Participation: refers to how youth are engaged in the design and implementation of policies and programmes that affect them, their communities, and their nations. In addition to making programmes more effective, involving youth in decision making has also been shown to provide them with opportunities to learn life skills and interact with adults.

The toolkit is written for anyone who wants to start a youth club or enhance its impact. It outlines many evidence-based, easily implemented, and best practice approaches, including for a club's design and structure, the safety of club members, the role youth play in leading clubs, engagement and support from the broader community, diversity and inclusion in club participation (including leadership roles for girls and young women), and ways that clubs and camps can build on each other to strengthen long-term effectiveness and sustainability. It also highlights minimum quality standards, a short list of specific, "doable" actions that reflect the global evidence base around effective clubs.

The toolkit outlines two primary tools:

1. The Club Checklist is a short checklist of evidence-based actions that outline specific steps through which Peace Corps volunteers, counterparts, and other youth can start, lead, and support effective clubs. A club's performance can be evaluated by checking which action steps were or are being followed.
2. The Clubs Rubric is a longer tool that can be used to gauge an existing club's quality and effectiveness. It utilises a matrix to walk users through what those actions might look like when a club is just getting started, when it is "moving along", and when it is showing results.

Links are provided within both the checklist and rubric to forms and templates to use in order to improve a club. Additional information and resources about specific topics are provided in the expanded resources section.