Leveling Up Tool

Source: Training Development Resources/PYD — "Leveling Up Tool" (youth-voiced worksheet)

A self-reflection tool built around five universal areas of positive youth development, framed in casual, youth-accessible language: assets (skills you have or want, and how to use them), enabling environment (spaces where you can use your skills and meet your needs), agency (control/autonomy over your own life), contribution (giving back to yourself or your community), and — introduced separately as a first pass — five life domains to reflect on (emotional/mental well-being, personal values & identity, relationships & community, dreams & goals, physical/lifestyle health).

The tool walks a young person through reflection questions for each domain, then explicitly cross-references Youth Era's own other tools depending on where they get stuck: the 40 Developmental Assets or Check-Out My Skills for the assets question, brainstorming for the enabling-environment question, the Spheres of Influence tool for the agency question, and Self-Love Rainbow resources for the contribution question. It closes with an action-planning template ("I am going to start to... / continue to... / stop...") tied back to which of the four areas (assets, agency, environment, contribution) the change supports, plus a prompt for how others can help.

This tool is essentially a hub that stitches together several other pieces of the curriculum (40 Assets, Spheres of Influence, Check-Out My Skills, Self-Love Rainbow) into one youth-facing planning exercise — useful confirmation that these are meant to be used as an interconnected toolkit, not standalone handouts.

A Working Definition of Empowerment

Source: Training Development Resources/PYD — graphic sourced from power2u.org (National Empowerment Center), "A Working Definition of Empowerment"

A non-exhaustive list of what empowerment might include, useful as a discussion prompt with a young person or as a coach's own working checklist: understanding that you have rights; effecting change in your own life and your community; learning skills you personally define as important (not skills someone else decided you need); changing others' perceptions of your competence and capacity to act; "coming out of the closet" (disclosing a stigmatized identity or experience on your own terms); growth and change that is ongoing and self-initiated rather than imposed; and increasing your own positive self-image while overcoming stigma. Explicitly reassures that no one needs all of these at once to be experiencing empowerment — it's presented as a spectrum of possible markers, not a checklist to complete. A good discussion-starter alongside the Leveling Up Tool's "agency" domain above.