In 2022, Urban Initiatives launched a new service line: Adult Learning, workshops for parents, caregivers, and educators. While this offering may have been new for schools, the work itself was not new for us. We know that excellent youth programming requires excellent adults, and since its inception, UI has prioritized high quality training for our coaching staff.
Adult Learning grew out of a desire to extend that same research based, positive youth development approach beyond our own people, expanding access to tools and frameworks that support the adults shaping young people’s lives every day.
Utilizing our adapted Weikart Center coaching quality model, UI brings best practices from more than 20 years of sport and play based youth development into deeply interactive, meaningful, and FUN learning experiences, allowing adult participants to experience the power of play themselves.
Our most popular workshops reach the following objectives: understanding the impact of play on mental and emotional well-being, practicing emotion coaching techniques to create safe spaces for youth, and exploring how stress and trauma affect the brain and behavior.
The Approach
Through gameplay and authentic discussion, parents, caregivers, and educators learn trauma-informed strategies to connect with young people through play, identify and regulate emotions, build resilience, and support social-emotional development.
While many participants attend workshops to gain practical tools for supporting children at home or engaging students in the classroom, they often leave with benefits they didn’t expect, including new ways to manage their own stress and deeper connections with fellow adults.
Educators echo this dual impact. Beyond learning new techniques, workshops create space for connection and belonging within school communities, something especially valuable in moments of transition or stress.
Growing Impact
In the 2022 to 2023 school year, Urban Initiatives led 20 workshops, reaching approximately 200 adults. Just two years later, in the 2024 to 2025 school year, UI facilitated nearly 150 workshops, engaging more than 4,000 adult participants and impacting over 70,000 young people by extension. This year, despite having a smaller team, we expect to have a similar reach with this service line.
As this work has scaled, quality has remained central. Across sessions, UI achieved a 95% participant satisfaction rate. 95% of parent and caregiver participants reported learning strategies to support their own well being in addition to their children’s. 94% of school staff participants said they learned something they planned to use immediately in their interactions with youth.
A key driver of this rapid growth has been word of mouth referrals among school leaders. UI takes partner satisfaction seriously and is proud that our partners actively champion this work within their networks. To date, 100% of workshop partners report that the content was relevant, high quality, and responsive to participant needs.
As demand continues to grow, UI remains committed to creating accessible, play based learning experiences that help adults translate insight into action, strengthening how they support young people at home, in classrooms, in school, and across communities. Anyone can request a Parent or Professional Development workshop via our request form!
