Youth Roadmaps: How Communities Can Change Youth Outcomes with a Unified Plan

Every community wants to be a place where young people grow up safe, supported, and confident about their future. However, the world around youth is shifting faster than the systems built to support them. Families feel the strain, city departments see the gaps, and young people feel the impact most of all. 

There are a few things to keep in mind while approaching this problem: 

1. Every youth’s experience is different and worth considering.
2. The most effective results are probably the ones that impact every young person in some way.
3. Young people don’t exist in a void; the full picture of their experience includes their family and home life, access to basic necessities, friends and social connections, their education, and their sense of self and hope for their future.

In communities across the country, young people are navigating rising mental health needs, steep cost barriers to things that enrich their lives, and transportation systems that don’t match how families live. At the same time, young people are calling for more belonging, more connection, and more ways to contribute to their community.

A Youth Roadmap is how cities can respond to these realities using research and community input.

In 2024, the City of Boise partnered with Rathbone Falvey Research for the Youth Roadmap project. The Roadmap is a comprehensive assessment of youth wellbeing in Boise. We knew that this research would only be successful with meaningful youth and community involvement; we worked with the City to form committees of City department leaders, community partners, and a group of local high schoolers. We conducted a community-wide survey that heard from 269 local youth (ages 12-20), 717 parents and guardians, and many other community members. We held conversations with four groups of teens, four groups of parents, and forty-six leaders from nonprofits, schools, faith communities, and recreational organizations. Read the City of Boise Youth Roadmap here.

This article explains what Youth Roadmaps are, why communities invest in them, what makes them successful, and how RFR approaches this work with rigor, thoughtfulness, and strategic depth.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts and experiences as part of this research.

What Is a Youth Roadmap?

A Youth Roadmap is a research-based, community-driven plan that helps a city coordinate how it supports young people from early childhood through young adulthood.

At its core, a Youth Roadmap tries to answer this question:

"What do young people in our community need to thrive, and how can we work together to make that happen?"

In research this looks like:

• Looking at systems. Involving schools, city departments, service providers, health partners, nonprofits, businesses, and faith groups. Considering how different systems impact each other and interact.
• Centering youth voice. Inviting young people to help shape the research, interpret findings, and influence recommendations.
• Listening to the data. Using surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder interviews alongside secondary data to see what patterns emerge.

A strong Youth Roadmap usually includes:

• A shared vision created with youth
• Community input from parents / guardians, community leaders, and other people who work to support youth
• A data-backed understanding of the most pressing challenges
• Clear priorities and direction
• A framework for collaboration

Most importantly, a Youth Roadmap is built with young people, not just for them.

Why Cities Turn to Youth Roadmaps

Youth Roadmaps can be incredibly helpful for cities to understand the full picture of the youth experience. Young people are shaped by many factors, and looking at their experiences at a citywide level lets us identify what challenges our young people are experiencing, and how to address them.

In 2025, several trends are making this type of project more urgent:

Mental health is declining sharply. Nationally, the CDC’s Youth Behavior Risk Survey 2013-2023 trends report found that 42% of high school students say they feel persistently sad or hopeless. One in five seriously considered suicide in the past year. Local data often shows similar or worse patterns. These struggles cut across all income levels, showing up in wealthy neighborhoods and working-class communities alike.

Families are feeling stretched thin. Rising housing costs and program fees price out many families, but even households with middle-class incomes struggle. Two working parents, packed schedules, and the impossible task of being everywhere at once means that when after-school activities require someone to drive across town at 4 PM on a Tuesday, many families simply can't make it work. It's not always about affording the activities and the gas, sometimes it's about affording the time and the energy to find out which activities are even an option.

Transportation has gaps. In car-dependent communities, teens without licenses or family vehicles get stuck. Public transit often doesn't reach all neighborhoods or runs on limited schedules. Even families with cars face transportation struggles, and parents sometimes feel like a personal chauffeur.

The digital world can be overwhelming. Parents across all backgrounds express concern about social media's impact on mental health, struggle to set boundaries around devices, and don’t feel prepared to guide teens through online spaces.

The future requires new skills. Today's young people will need to navigate evolving job markets and find their place in the world. What can cities do to help prepare them?

A Youth Roadmap addresses all of this by bringing people together to establish a shared understanding of what matters most. It brings organizations together to coordinate services that support youth, and gives communities a research-based direction for how to invest in young people.

What Successful Youth Roadmaps Look Like

Across the country, from Hampton, VA to Portland, OR, successful Youth Roadmaps share a set of common ingredients:

1. Youth voice is central.

Hampton, Virginia was a pioneer in the 1990s, surveying over 5,000 youth and adults. The key move: they let young people co-write their section of the plan. Then they created a formal Youth Commission so teens would have ongoing say in city decisions, not just input during the planning phase. Hampton continues to empower youth via this commission and by hiring youth to help update the plan annually, ensuring ongoing youth voice in city decisions.

2. It leans into cross-sector collaboration.

Minneapolis, Minnesota tackled the coordination challenge head-on by creating a Youth Coordinating Board that brought together city, county, and school officials. They used youth researchers to map what resources already existed in different neighborhoods. Their refreshed Children and Youth Agenda included a youth-led town hall to celebrate the plan and maintain community engagement.

3. Data includes a variety of sources and perspectives.

Indio, California went big on outreach during their two-year planning process: they gathered 1,600 youth survey responses and spoke with 250 community members. They brought community leaders together for intensive planning sessions. A tangible outcome was the creation of a new teen center and improvements to parks (2 new parks built, 6 renovated) demonstrating how a roadmap can lead to real infrastructure and program investments.

4. Plans are built for clear direction and action.

Portland, Oregon did something different: they created a Youth Bill of Rights. Young people gathered input from 3,000+ peers, drafted the document themselves, then educated city officials and got it adopted. Youth leaders not only drafted the document but also successfully advocated for its adoption, illustrating the power of letting young people define their own rights and priorities.

What Youth Roadmap Research May Look Like

To build a roadmap that reflects the full youth experience, it’s important to have multiple methods of research working together. Comprehensive youth roadmap research typically includes:

Youth & Parent Surveys: Large-scale surveys (often 250-750+ respondents) use a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to capture experiences with mental health, activities, transportation, and access barriers across all neighborhoods. Surveys should avoid bias. Large samples allow analysis by ZIP code, income level, age, and other demographics to reveal disparities.

Focus Groups: While surveys can tell you how many people have a certain experience, conversations can reveal the "why"; what creates barriers, and what helps young people succeed? 

Stakeholder Interviews: One-on-one conversations with leaders from schools, healthcare organizations, nonprofits, and city departments can uncover systemic opportunities, coordination gaps, and implementation realities. 

Secondary Data Review: Analysis of existing data like graduation rates, mental health statistics, transit usage, demographic trends can provide context, baseline measurements, and comparison to local, state, and national patterns.

Youth Advisors: Throughout the process, youth advisors play a part by helping design research instruments, interpret findings, and ensure the work reflects their lived experience as young people.

When multiple methods align, clear patterns emerge. If surveys, focus groups, stakeholder interviews, and existing research all point to the same priorities, communities can trust that those patterns are worth addressing. 

What might emerge from Youth Roadmap research?

When communities conduct comprehensive youth research, certain themes come up consistently (although the details might look different for each city, family, and young person). In our recent roadmap work, three priority areas often rise to the top:

Youth mental health and wellbeing. Mental health challenges are experienced by a rising number of young people, with gaps in prevention and access to treatment. Parents consistently report difficulty navigating systems and finding providers.

Access barriers to activities and opportunities. Communities often have strong programming already, but cost, time constraints, transportation, awareness, and shifting cultural expectations (like competitive youth sports) limit who can participate, affecting families across economic circumstances.

Infrastructure as the foundation. Transportation is often mentioned as a primary barrier. Without reliable ways for youth to get places on their own, participation becomes a family logistics challenge that excludes those without flexible schedules or multiple vehicles. Youth also identify the need for safe, accessible gathering spaces beyond home and school.

These themes aren't unique to one city. They reflect broader trends of impactful areas that communities can address to help youth on a system-wide level.

What Do Youth Roadmap Recommendations Look Like?

Youth roadmap recommendations are directional priorities that would improve youth outcomes. They are designed to express the most essential parts of the recommended action.

Here's what that may look like:

The recommendation "Address transportation barriers preventing youth from accessing programs" might seem broad at first, but at the core it represents what the research uncovered. For example:

• Half of youth surveyed identified transportation as a barrier.
• Focus groups revealed transportation as a barrier across the city.
• Interviews showed that multiple organizations face similar transportation problems independently. 
• Data analysis confirmed that certain populations were disproportionately affected by lack of transportation.
• Transit records and focus groups showed service gaps during key hours in youth schedules.

This recommendation provides direction for the community to address the problem of youth transportation in a number of ways: extending transit routes, improving safety on walking/biking paths, raising awareness about existing transit, coordinating carpools through community organizations, providing transit stipends for program participation, or bringing programs into underserved neighborhoods.

The right outcome of this recommendation depends on specific neighborhood contexts, available budget, the organizations involved, and community preferences. The roadmap establishes what matters most based on data, and provides direction for implementation teams to move forward independently.

Recommendations at this strategic level do several things:

Establish clear shared vision and values. By making this recommendation, there is an established direction for the community to address.

Create space for multiple organizations to contribute. Instead of prescribing one solution, different partners are invited to bring their expertise and resources toward the shared priority.

Allow flexibility over time. Communities change, budgets shift, and new opportunities and challenges emerge. Strategic direction stays relevant even as specific tactics change.

Respect local decision-making. Research can show what matters, but implementation decisions involve set processes, community input, and independent organizational judgment.

By establishing shared priorities grounded in what young people and families say they need most, Youth Roadmap recommendations can enable coordinated action.

What Makes a High-Quality Youth Roadmap?

Not all youth planning is created equal. Here's what is necessary for a roadmap that can effect change:

Multiple types of research that validate each other. If surveys, focus groups, interviews, and existing data all point to the same conclusions, you can trust those findings to represent youth experiences.

Real youth partnership. Young people help design the research, interpret what it means, and shape recommendations. Youth feel welcome and heard in focus group settings.

Intentional outreach to include all voices. This means removing barriers to research participation (providing translation, virtual options, food), making sure to hear from all areas of a community, and making extra effort to reach people who might not usually get asked.

Recommendations grounded in evidence. Basing research methods on best practices, eliminating bias wherever possible, and taking meaning from the data instead of projecting personal assumptions.

Honest about limitations. Research should name what it can and can't tell you, rather than overstating conclusions.

Analysis by subgroups to reveal disparities. Population-level numbers can hide big differences in experience. Breaking down by neighborhood, income, race, and other factors shows who's being served and who's being left out while also examining challenges that affect families across all circumstances.

Checking findings with people who know the community. Throughout the process, advisors and stakeholders review interpretations to make sure they align with their reality. Listening to and incorporating feedback.

How RFR Approaches Youth Roadmaps

RFR's methodology is built on the belief that youth planning must be rigorous and actionable in order to create impact.

Here's what sets our work apart:

We pair research rigor with human-centered design.

Our mixed-method approach includes surveys, focus groups, interviews, environmental scans, and comparative analyses. Our work is careful to not reduce youth to data points; we design research that reveals lived experience alongside statistical patterns.

We facilitate collaboration across systems.

Youth roadmaps require coordinating stakeholders who rarely work together: city departments (Parks, Police, Fire, Library, Transportation), schools, nonprofits, healthcare providers, mental health organizations, and community groups. RFR acts as a third-party convener, creating the structure that enables productive collaboration.

We center youth voices with authenticity.

Youth advisors shape research questions, weigh in on outreach strategy and materials, interpret findings, and influence recommendations.

We build plans to be implemented.

Cities don't need more binders. They need ownership structures, early wins, and coordination tools. We ensure leaders walk away confident in what to do next.

We look to the future for youth planning.

RFR follows trends shaping the next 10-20 years: mental health shifts, digital life realities, climate challenges, workforce evolution, and youth mobility expectations. This ensures cities aren't just responding to today's needs, but preparing for the world young people will inherit.

Youth Roadmaps Are the First Step

A Youth Roadmap is more than a planning document, it's a commitment.

It says: "We see our young people. We hear what's working and what isn't. And we're ready to build something better together."

Strong youth outcomes happen when communities choose to understand and listen to their young people deeply, then remove barriers with intention and collaboration

The result is a clear, collective vision, and the first steps to achieve it.

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