The development of the EMPOWER social-emotional learning curriculum for youth, aged 11–14 years, in after-school settings

This paper describes how our community-academic partnership team co-developed a social-emotional learning curriculum for youth aged 11-14 years who attend after-school programs in socially and economically marginalized communities. The ANONYMIZED social-emotional curriculum was co-designed in alignment with implementation science principles to ensure an evidence-based approach to building a feasible curriculum. In the first-step we conducted a needs assessment to understand the emotional and behavioral needs of youth who attend after-school programs. We carried out in-person and online focus groups with 109 youth and surveyed 82 parents/caregivers and 77 staff to investigate youth mental well-being needs. In the second-step, we established a curriculum co-development committee amongst our partnership and began consolidating evidence to determine a structure that could fit seamlessly into after-school settings to meet the emotional and behavioral needs of youth. In the third step we were intentional to embed an iterative and user-informed framework to develop the curriculum, and created youth, staff, and parent/caregiver advisory committees with 10 participants recruited in each group to provide feedback on pedagogy and curriculum structure. Lastly, in the fourth-step we evaluated and tested a segment of the ANONYMIZED curriculum, the self-awareness domain, with 10 staff and 116 youth across five sites at one after-school program. Building an evidence-informed curriculum that is co-designed increases the likelihood of a curriculum that is relevant, fits seamlessly into after-school programs, and increases youth’s social-emotional learning skills.