Empowering Youth Self-Advocacy

Your Course Description

Your Competency Focus Area

The Field of Youth Work

A skilled youth worker recognizes the potential youth have and understands their innate resilience. Encouraging a youth to take the lead can create safe, supportive spaces in your program to increase engagement and positive outcomes.
The Cornerstone Youth Advocacy model will be reviewed to give insight into proven practices for empowering youth self-advocacy, fostering collaborative partnerships, and nurturing leadership skills.
Learn how to help youth feel safe and recover from crisis by validating feelings, being a trusted adult, and teaching tools to cope with challenges.

Your Learning Objectives

Gain an understanding of a youth advocacy model that emphasizes how youth workers can support young people’s social emotional skills
Be able to maintain program integrity and create collaborative partnerships when your youth-centered program is embedded within other systems such as schools
Learn how to empower youth to be self-advocates and take the lead on tackling issues of social justice and systems change
Explore the differences and similarities of advocacy and activism work and develop skills for using this framework to best support the young people you serve
Gain insight into providing support to a young person who has disclosed that they have been a victim of some form of violence or abuse

Your Course Details

Completion Certificate
Youth Worker Track
This training will count as 1.5 CE hours for most boards. Please contact your board directly with questions on submitting. Course details for CE submissions provided.

Your Trainer

As an artist, advocate, and anti-violence educator Tyler Osterhaus has devoted his career to ending gender-based violence through the promotion of responsible fatherhood, healthy relationship education, sexual assault prevention, and positive masculinity. Tyler has brought his high energy, entertaining, and often humorous approach to anti-violence education to non-profits, schools, human services agencies, military installations, and community groups. Tyler currently serves as the School Based Services Coordinator at Cornerstone providing advocacy and violence prevention education in schools across Hennepin County.

Michelle Erdman has a Bachelor’s degree in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and a minor in Public Health. She has experience as a teacher and has been a victim/survivor advocate for over 2 years. In addition, she presented at the National Sexual Assault Conference in 2019. Passionate about social justice, youth work, and being trauma informed, she brings her skills and talents to her position at Cornerstone Advocacy Services, where she provides advocacy and education in many school settings.