After an 18-month Sprockets Learning Cohort (SLC), a group of dedicated youth workers came together to reflect on their shared journey — a process that not only deepened their professional practice but also ignited meaningful change in their thoughts and practices.
Through monthly sessions of collaborative, relationship-centered learning and critical reflection, participants built strong peer relationships, exchanged diverse perspectives, and explored intersection of identity, systemic oppression, trauma, mental wellness, and restorative practices.
Throughout the process, participants didn’t just learn together—they built a bonded, supportive network of peers. Each youth worker also undertook an action project, applying insights from the cohort within their own organizational or community context. These projects became living examples of practice, demonstrating how professional growth can ripple outward into systems change.
Personalized projects took many different forms, shaped by the unique contexts of each participant. Some were conceptual, others focused on process, and some laid the groundwork for future initiatives. While they were unique projects, there were a variety of themes that emerged such as:
- Building programs and practices that support mental wellness
- Building capacities to support youth workers
- Creating & sustaining community
- Building spaces that center identity
- building infrastructures
- Building and living into ethical practices
- Building capacity to connect
- Building from community knowledge
To document these experiences, participants' reflections were transformed into visual designs by Tim Foss of More Belief. Throughout the report, recurring images of ferns appear—a fractal that thrives across Minnesota. In her work on organizing strategies, adrienne maree brown highlights how embracing fractal design us see that “what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.” SLC was built as a fractal model.
At the heart of SLC was the belief that investing in the growth of youth workers is an investment in the growth of youth and, ultimately, communities.
Thank you to Julie Richards of Inquire, Decipher, Progress Consulting for facilitating, coaching, and curating the cohort experience, and Shaun Walsh for serving as a coach and capturing the process.
Click to download the full Learning Cohort Visual Report
The Sprockets Learning Cohort (SLC) was a special project funded by the McNeely Foundation.