Psychologist Karen Mahler introduced me to the positive youth development paradigm when she was brought in to shepherd along a project I was working on for the New York City Office of Child Support Services.

Our team had been tasked with completely reimagining how parents under the age of 25 enter the child support program. But we couldn’t do that in a meaningful, lasting way if we relied on arm-chair generalizing about The Youth and all the time they spend on TikTok tweeting their SnappyGrams. We needed someone who could keep the lived experiences and developmental realities of young people front and center, while also being able to absorb the Rube Goldberg mechanics of the child support intake process and the legal and financial realities that shape everything in the public sector.

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Karen was an ideal leader for that role. An independent consultant and for the last five years the Director of Strategy and Innovation for the Youth Development Institute, Karen has a wealth of experience working with community-based organizations and city agencies to enhance programming and service provision for young people in school, community, and system-involved settings.

Karen began her career as a clinician on an adolescent psychiatric inpatient unit and as a psychotherapist in private practice. As a post-doctoral fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University, she was part of the team determining the efficacy of the Street Smart HIV prevention intervention, which became part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–disseminated best practices for behavioral HIV prevention. Karen also developed sexual health communications and advocacy materials for Planned Parenthood of New York City.

As you’ll hear in this episode of News from the Peak, Karen combines the passion and acuity of a skilled psychologist with an educator’s unstinting concern for the interests and strengths of young people. She drives home the importance—really, the sheer practical necessity—of listening to young people at every stage in the process of creating programs intended to serve them.

The similarities between positive youth development and the kind of deep listening and serious introspection required for implicit bias and diversity, equity, and inclusion work aren’t accidental. Any serious attempt to work with young people has to recognize the many-sidedness of their identities and acknowledge that many of their experiences and the experiences of those they love have been shaped by inequities, including structural barriers created by historical and contemporary attitudes about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, or class.

Working with Karen on that project for the City of New York challenged me to think more deeply about young parents. But it also helped reinforce the larger and seemingly never-ending lesson that really putting people at the center of our programs means being willing to question every part of those programs.

As anyone who has ever tried to make even minor changes to a heavily regulated program can attest, bromides like that are easy to write but hard to practice. Shifting constantly from big-picture thinking to fine-grained operational analysis is demanding and often fruitless. It can seem like our programs have no give anywhere.

When we were working together on that project, I was grateful to have had Karen there to push me and the rest of the team to find ways to deliver what we promised. She managed to embrace and appreciate our work while also refusing to let us settle for half measures.

I’m glad the listeners to News from the Peak have a chance to get a sense of Karen’s work and the potential and importance of positive youth development as a framework for building valuable programs for the people we serve.

Resources

The website of Karen Mahler, PsyD.

Zaretta Hammond’s book Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.

The Warm Demander framework.

Podcast Episode - Karen Mahler and Positive Youth Development