About Us

The YouthSites Research Project: An Overview

The YouthSites project examines the creative arts sector for youth from socially marginalized backgrounds in Vancouver, Toronto and London over the last 25 years. We map youth participation in out-of-school arts learning and investigate the structural relationship between the development of this sector and the changing role and meaning of creative education.

The principal researchers of this project each worked an average of five years in this sector, and we know first hand that organizations and their staff and volunteers do incredibly valuable work for young people and their communities. With a focus on the organizations, the people who run the programs, the arts activities and the young people themselves, our aim is to portray the struggles and achievements of this sector and to foreground its importance in contemporary urban life.

What we hope our project will do:

By compiling data and comparing experiences and strategies used in London, Toronto, and Vancouver, we will point out similarities across the sector as well as key differences that define the communities in Canada and the UK. We will highlight how key policies, events, and social circumstances have influenced arts and cultural work with youth. We believe these insights will:
¬ make the case for the need to invest in the sector to ensure its longevity;
¬ increase understanding of the particular and high-level skills used by workers in this sector – both artists dedicated to social change and social justice workers using arts as a platform;
¬ highlight specific needs and challenges youth community arts organizations face; and,
¬ raise the profile of these organizations and this sector among politicians, policy makers, educators, researchers and allied communities.

By using an historical approach (1995 – 2015) we will be better able to discuss the long-term impact of policies and events on organizations and their clients. These insights could demonstrate:
¬ the particular pitfalls of various kinds of organizational insecurity, including access to stable funding and staff and the availability of space for programming;
¬ how ongoing issues and shorter term trends and panics impact young people and the work of arts organizations; and,
¬ how the sector is variously tasked to be a catalyst in social provision for youth civic participation; community building; conflict resolution; personal growth; mental health; and training for employment in the cultural industries.

How we will work with arts organizations:

We commit to the ethical treatment of individuals and organizations. This means:
¬ de-identifying sensitive issues, using pseudonyms for young people, and otherwise making sure participants are anonymous when requested;
¬ individual cultural workers will have pseudonyms except in cases where they are such well-known figures as to make this step redundant;
¬ we will actively get consent to participate from individuals, and will respect the wishes of those who decline or withdraw from participation in the research;
¬ some organizations may not be entirely anonymous because they will be identifiable by people who know them;
¬ the more accurate we can be about facts and figures, the better our case will be, but we can disassociate commercially sensitive facts and information from specific organizations. (For example, very specific dollar/pound values on donations can be made more general; names of individual donors need not be reported if requested; particular income figures can be rounded out.);
¬ we will encourage feedback and will consider criticism and commentary in our revisions prior to publication; and,
¬ we will develop open access, online accounts of the sector for the use of organizations in grant applications or communications with policy makers, boards, donors and government.

YouthSites is a unique and timely project that aims to examine and raise the profile of a sector that is increasingly important in the lives of young people in cities around the world. Please send us questions and comments, and stay in touch with our work through this site, where you will find updated research reports, working papers, statistics, and news about our events in Vancouver, Toronto and London.