Celebrating 10 Years of YouthREX (2015-2025)
YouthREX is celebrating the 10th year of a shared commitment to walking alongside Ontario youth programs in advancing the wellbeing of young people.
Over the past 10 years (2015-2025), YouthREX has become a trusted partner to youth programs, youth workers, youth, community-based researchers, and policymakers across the province. This is not just a celebration of longevity but a celebration of impact. The kind of sustained, community-rooted impact that happens when community partners and changemakers come together around a shared vision for youth wellbeing.
Our mission was always to make evidence and evaluation more accessible, engaging, and actionable for those working with and for youth, especially youth facing compounding barriers. Our objectives have remained focused on:
- collaboratively supporting youth workers to have access to professional learning that centres equity and evidence;
- co-creating a youth sector that is more connected, reflective, and strategic;
- bridging research and youth work so shared knowledge is inclusive and mobilized to shape better futures for young people; and
- developing equity-informed evaluation frameworks that acknowledge lived experience and affirm both youth voice and community expertise, ensuring youth programs get the support and resources they need to understand their impact with confidence.
A Heartfelt Thank You to Ontario’s Youth Sector ❤️
❤ THANK YOU to everyone who has engaged with YouthREX to share knowledge, build capacity, and promote reflective practice. Thank you for allowing us to learn with and from you! Your partnership is the foundation of our collective impact.
❤ THANK YOU to all the young people whose brilliance and knowledge have guided and contributed to all we’ve accomplished. YouthREX was founded with the support of a Youth Advisory Council, and youth engagement has remained a priority. Whether in evaluation, resource development, learning opportunities, or community dialogues and events, being connected to authentic youth voice and perspectives has been critical for YouthREX’s relevance and success over the past decade.
❤ THANK YOU to our funder, the Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services (MCCSS), for their visionary support and funding over the past 10 years. We’re grateful to MCCSS for the opportunity to be part of Ontario’s Youth Action Plan and for fully supporting us in making the deliverables of our contract more responsive to the realities of the youth sector, especially in the early years of our partnership. Their investment made it possible for YouthREX to flourish into a responsive resource hub that supports the important work that youth programs do to advance youth wellbeing in Ontario.
Our partnership with MCCSS concluded on March 31, 2025. Since then, YouthREX has creatively pieced together resources to continue supporting youth workers and youth programs in advancing youth wellbeing through our online platforms, including the Knowledge Hub, Learn by YouthREX, Data Hub, REX TV, and Virtual Café by YouthREX.
To commemorate #YouthREXat10, we’re excited to host an online event on Thursday, May 07 from 12 PM to 2 PM that continues YouthREX’s 10-year tradition of co-creating spaces for the Ontario youth sector to learn and reflect together about the possibilities and limitations of youth work.
Our special guest will be Dr. Bianca Baldridge, Associate Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education and Critical Youth Work Collective, a research lab committed to humanizing research, critical youth work pedagogies, and honouring youth work professionals. Bianca’s keynote Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring will draw from her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, to underscore the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of youth workers, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth. The event will also include:
- A Q&A with Bianca and a community dialogue for participants to share their youth work stories and explore transformative youth work practices that are attentive to the structural contexts that shape young people’s lives.
- A performance of a specially commissioned spoken-word poem by Eddie Lartey, award-winning poet, creative, and author. In this spoken word poetry, Eddie draws on metaphors and imagery about music to paint a picture of what youth workers do and what their work is really like.
Learn more about the event and register for free.
To learn more about the impact of #YouthREXat10, check out our impact page:
- Watch our 10-year impact reel featuring key moments from our journey.
- Explore our impact reports, featuring highlights from external and internal evaluations that reflect the voices of young people, youth workers, and organizations that have been part of YouthREX over the past decade.
- Browse our photo galleries highlighting memories from events, trainings, and youth celebrations between 2015 and 2025.
You can also visit the discussion board on Storying Youth Work in the Virtual Café by YouthREX to share your stories of what youth work means to you.
❤ THANK YOU to everyone who has been part of the YouthREX story!
