From Analysis to Empowerment

Abstract

Community youth spaces have spread across the Arab region as a response to a structural imbalance: young people form its demographic center, yet remain at the margins of its civic and economic institutions. Mature spaces have built real operational experience over the past decade, but the field has lacked a documented, repeatable way of transferring that experience to emerging spaces without imposing standardized models on them.

This paper documents a five-stage participatory action research (PAR) cycle carried out over twelve months in 2025 with six community youth spaces in Jordan and Tunisia. It combines organizational diagnostics, participatory needs assessment, capacity development, performance coaching, community-led implementation, and mixed-method evaluation to examine how youth spaces can strengthen their organizational systems, youth engagement, leadership, and civic participation over time.

Why This Research Matters

Most support to youth-serving organizations is delivered as one-off training or short-term assessment. This study set out to test something different: whether the research process itself, when genuinely participatory, could function as a capacity development intervention in its own right, not just a way of measuring one.

In youth civil society, a genuinely participatory research process is itself a capacity development intervention.

That distinction matters for anyone designing support programs for youth-serving organizations: it shifts the question from "how do we assess these spaces" to "how do we build their capacity through the act of assessing them together."

Key Themes & Areas Explored

The research is read through an analytical framework developed for the wider Youth Spaces research program, which conceptualizes youth spaces as systems that progressively transform organizational inputs into civic, social, and economic value across five stages:

Within that lens, three cross-case themes shaped the findings:

Ownership predicted velocity. The spaces that argued hardest with their own diagnostic findings moved fastest once implementation began.

Passion follows identity fit. Member belonging formed faster where a space's programming mirrored what its members already cared about.

Social capital develops in sequence. Bonding capital was strong at baseline in every space; bridging capital built up within a single cycle; linking capital, connection to institutions and resources beyond the space, was the slowest to mature.

Methodological Approach

The study used a five-stage participatory action research cycle, applying one diagnostic framework, one participatory process, and one evaluation logic across all six spaces to make cross-case comparison possible:

1. Situation Analysis: a six-dimension organizational diagnostic across all spaces, read through social capital theory.

2. Participatory Diagnosis: youth teams contested and reshaped their own findings into an owned priority map.

3. Capacity Development: a five-module regional program, each module carrying a mandatory field assignment.

4. Community-Led Implementation: leadership passed fully to the spaces, with each leading one to three local interventions.

5. Evaluation & Learning: mixed-method evaluation combining re-diagnosis, Outcome Harvesting, and Most Significant Change.

The core sample covered six youth spaces across Jordan and Tunisia, assessed against 36 diagnostic indicators:

• Darat (Jordan) · the reference case, founded through a complete youth-led research cycle
• Social Hub (Jordan) · community entrepreneurship and networking orientation
• Ofoq (Jordan) · life skills and youth leadership programming
• Bareeq (Jordan) · young volunteer energy and an active volunteer base
• Youth Gathering for Future (Tunisia, Sousse) · a digital-first space organizing its community primarily online
• Al-Warsha (Tunisia, Tunis) · an arts space where creative practice opens the door to civic life

The process also extended in lighter form to spaces in Tunisia and Morocco beyond the core six-case sample.

Request the Full Research

The complete working paper documents the full five-stage cycle with methodological transparency, six comparative case profiles, cross-case comparative analysis, and evidence-based recommendations for youth spaces, NGOs, governments, donors, and regional networks. It is shared directly on request rather than published as a public download.