Youth Excel's Research-To-Change Toolkit

The Research-to-Change (R2C) Toolkit, designed by the Youth Excel: Our Knowledge, Leading Change consortium, guides youth-led and youth-serving organizations to strengthen their positive youth development programs using research and data. This youth-inclusive toolkit offers a step-by-step process to planning and carrying out research and using findings for concrete action. 

Youth Excel’s consortium members have experience designing and leading youth-focused research and programs across sectors and regions, and many are youth themselves. One of the program’s central goals is to strengthen the capacities of leaders at youth-led and youth-serving organizations to use research to advance the impact of their work while influencing positive youth development agendas.  

The Youth Excel consortium focused on how to make research accessible, actionable, and enticing to young leaders. Through a human-centered design process with several local, youth-led, and global development organizations, they defined implementation research for program strengthening, or what the program calls Research-to-Change (R2C). R2C is an approach that embeds research into implementation, enabling organizations to gather data, take what they learn, and turn it into what they do in real-time. R2C is not a one-time effort; rather, it is a continuous learning and adaptation journey. R2C is based on approaches to implementation research which you can learn more about in this Implementation Research At-a-Glance Factsheet and can practice by following this toolkit.   

Using this toolkit, youth-led and youth-serving organizations will be able to make data-informed decisions so that their programs can continuously grow to help more people in more impactful ways.