Youth Advocates for Health
Issue
Response
Specifically, YA4-H! trains teens as teachers and advocates for health in partnership with adult mentors to teach nutrition skills to children. In addition to improving nutrition outcomes for children, YA4-H! promotes positive youth development, builds healthy youth-adult partnerships, and facilitates internalization of curriculum content in teen teachers.
The YA4-H! model uses a three-step implementation model including:
- Initial training with a 12-hour, statewide ‘train the trainer’ event for teen teachers and their adult partners
- Ongoing recruitment and training of additional teen teachers and partners at the local level
- Implementation of selected curriculum, in our case, Choose Health Food, Fun, Fitness nutrition curriculum (Cornell University, 2014).
Since its inception in 2013, YA4-H! has trained approximately 300 teens to teach a nutrition curriculum to over 10,000 children in 17 counties across Washington state.
By The Numbers
Teen Teachers reported
Positive Youth Development outcomes of:
- 96% reported increased self-confidence
- 100% reported increased communication and leadership skills
- 91% reported greater teaching skills
Nutrition knowledge and behavior outcomes of:
- 98% reported learning how to make healthy food choices
- 100% reported learning the importance of eating a healthy diet
- 100% reported eating more fruits and vegetables



Impacts
Participants consistently reported that because of their YA4-H! experience, they view themselves as leaders, mentors, and people who can help others. Evaluation of the program shows teen teachers’ levels of comfort, confidence, and teaching skills increased.
Pre- and post-survey results, interviews, open-ended comments, and observations showed increases in health knowledge and healthy eating behaviors among both teens and younger youth. Those include reading nutrition labels and engaging in more physical activity on a regular basis. We found teen teachers and ‘students’ demonstrated increases in health/nutrition awareness, skills such as food preparation, and increased motivation and desire to eat healthy.
Evaluation results found aspects of both positive youth development and youth-adult partnership frameworks. Teen teachers and adult partners consistently reported the initial statewide training was a key component including associated curricula.
The YA4-H! program has consistently demonstrated success in achieving its mission and targeted goals. We found, overall, that when youth are adequately trained and provided a high level of support, structure, and organization to teach younger youth, everyone benefits (Weybright et al., 2016).

Quotes
“The more I learn about the … curriculum and the more I learn about health and nutrition in general, the more I can apply it to my own life and see the results myself.”
“I can’t go anywhere without, like, wanting to look at labels or something.”
“Our adult partner has helped a lot, like making sure that we know how to deal with different kinds of kids and different kinds of situations.”
“I was really shy to talk in front of a whole bunch of people but… I could do it now without being shy.”
“At the last school, a girl came to 5 out of the 6 lessons that we taught. Every week she’d come back and talk about how she used what she learned. … It was pretty cool that we made that much of an impact.”