About youthink

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Our Vision

We strive for a future where adolescents have the support, resources, and confidence to build their most brilliant futures.

Our Guiding Principles

At youthink, we:

  • Center new, non-traditional, diverse, and marginalized voices, identities, and experiences.
  • Embrace multidimensional approaches to adolescent sexual and reproductive health, including those that champion family planning, sex positivity, and reproductive justice.
  • View failure as an essential part of learning and the freedom to always re-examine our decisions and change our minds.
  • Maintain open communication, foster collaboration, and value transparency with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Build processes, environments, and innovations that are age-appropriate, medically accurate, culturally and linguistically responsive, and trauma-informed.
  • Facilitate with humility, and honor lived experience as expertise.
  • Embed equitable and participatory design into every stage of the innovation lifecycle.
  • Recognize previous and existing harms that exist in the adolescent sexual and reproductive health fields.
  • Consider the potential unintended consequences of our efforts.
  • Commit to creative risk-taking and being brave, curious, and openminded.

What is youthink?

At youthink, we believe everyone is an innovator. youthink Incubator Hub is a cohort program that partners with organizations across the United States and its territories to develop innovative solutions to complex challenges in adolescent and young adult health. youthink supports teams through an 8-month process – by providing training, coaching, funding, and more – to help them design and test groundbreaking ideas.

youthink is powered by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and receives funding from the  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs (OPA). We are part of a larger network of Innovation Hubs working together to foster innovation and expand the evidence to support and advance health equity in the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program. Read our FAQs to learn more about youthink.

What is the youthink process?

The youthink process is grounded in design thinking. Over the course of 8 months, youthink teams will:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of their community’s unique needs
  • Brainstorm ideas for improving the health of young people
  • Build, test, and refine a possible solution
  • Receive up to $50,000 to bring their innovations to life
  • Get guidance from coaches, trainers, and subject matter experts

youthink trainers and coaches provide continuous support, guiding teams through each key milestone in the process.

Take a look at our youthink journeymap graphic below for more information:

  • In the Orient stage, teams get to know each other and the youthink process.
  • In the Empathize stage, teams connect directly with the people impacted by the issue they are focusing on and learn about their experiences and needs.
  • In the Define stage, teams analyze the information they’ve gathered and get clear on the challenge they are working to address.
  • In the Ideate stage, teams brainstorm ideas for how to solve their problem.
  • In the Prototype stage, teams build a preliminary representation of an idea to share with stakeholders.
  • In the Test stage, teams gather feedback to improve their prototypes.
  • In the Sustain stage, teams think about how to continue working on their prototype and applying design thinking skills after youthink.
  • In the Message stage, teams learn how to tell the story of their work and celebrate their process.