CIRT Youth Empowerment Programs

CIRT Youth Empowerment Programs are behavioral, structural, and cultural processes that provide young people the capacity, authority, and power to take charge of their own lives and the lives of others, both children and adults, and to make decisions and bring about change. We define empowerment generally as giving the poor more freedom of choice and control over their own lives. This, in our opinion, involves having authority over resources and choices.

The foundation of CIRT's Youth Empowerment Programs is the belief that young people are the best resource for fostering growth and that they are change agents who can confront their own difficulties and find solutions to their own issues. CIRT holds that all youth, regardless of their cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, are capable of giving others' needs and wants the respect they deserve and addressing them.