Community-minded, adolescent-driven: addressing behavioral health disparities through youth participatory research...

Ongoing intergenerational trauma, racial injustice, technological advancements, and the COVID-19 pandemic contribute to increased mental health risks and a persistent unmet need for youth evidence-based behavioral health services. While research and intervention implementation continue to progress, it is rare to see efforts that intentionally include adolescent perspectives to bring evidence-based programming to communities. Youth-centered approaches such as Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) offer researchers and systems leaders an orientation to learn through the youth voices most impacted, building programs in developmentally informed ways while simultaneously promoting positive youth development. This paper showcases the participatory research impacts by presenting four unique community case studies that illustrate processes to dismantle behavioral health disparities in California, Washington, Hawai'i, and New Jersey. In each case, adolescents and the communities that serve them collaborate, co-research, and act as agents of change to address specific mental health-promoting topics. Drawing on our collective years of engaging directly with young people in applied research across diverse environments, this brief case study collection offers collaborative perspectives of participatory research relationship-building, sustainable and time-conscious programming, and team creation that promotes bidirectional knowledge transfer for shared decision-making. The authors explore overlapping contextual considerations influencing participatory trust, relationship hierarchies, collaborative decision-making around research and programming, and creating sustainable behavioral health promotion activities anchored in community. This paper also acknowledges the deteriorating funding landscape for behavioral health initiatives and offers guidance for financially sustainable program co-creation. Authored by researchers and community partners, these case studies provide actionable frameworks that are scalable and adaptable to new communities and implementation teams that address key adolescent developmental tasks and cultural considerations. Integrating youth perspectives directly into rigorous research processes represents an applied solution to pressing issues affecting education, communities, and the future of adolescent behavioral health.