Fitchburg Teen Center
EQT By Design is currently working with the City of Fitchburg and a group of teen interns who are leading the way to develop designs for a Fitchburg Teen Center!
This project highlights what makes EQT By Design different. We’re not engaging adults to inform teens of what teens want. Instead, we recruited teen interns to engage their peers and the wider Fitchburg community on what they want in a teen center. This aligns with our philosophy of centering your voice and incorporating what YOU envision into community-based projects and change.
Project Impact
This project was unique in many regards, including the use of Teen Interns. Eight teen interns helped design teen engagements and the project. EQT, with the assistance of the student interns, developed core values to build community understanding of how the strategy team will distill community input and ultimately make decisions.These values were shared with the community throughout the engagement process. EQT will again include teen interns in this process and will also add two student fellowships!
Survey
Two surveys were conducted, one targeting teens and the other a community-wide survey.
390 combined respondents
214 teen respondents
176 adult respondents
Focus Groups
Four focus group sessions, one of them included teens in Juvenile detention.
81 total participants
58 teen participants.
Results from sessions
A particular focus group to highlight was the session at the Juvenile Detention Center, which was poignant. These teens from the detention center did NOT have a history of a teen center experience, yet all said yes to supporting a teen center.
The first part of this project was used to demonstrate the community's, especially teens', desire for a Fitchburg Teen Center. It also helped create a vision of what it will look like. Now, based on this first part of the project, Fitchburg has launched the second phase, a feasibility study— EQT is in the early stages of this phase, not yet holding an engagement.