Our Mission: To help adults to help youth in MetroWest.

Our Vision: Every young person is connected to a caring adult.

Our Positive Youth Development Philosophy: We believe that every adult has a responsibility to support and encourage young people to engage with and contribute to the world around them. Without this level of support from at least one adult, young people are less likely to thrive. We help to create caring adults who focus on developing and fostering the strengths that young people possess, as well as enable environments where youth can let those strengths shine.

While much of our approach is modeled after the Search Institute’s research and materials, we do our best to translate that material through the experiences of youth and youth workers in our communities.

Our Partners

The Central MetroWEst Substance Abuse Prevention collaborative

Represents the leadership team for the MetroWest Caring Adults Network. Representatives from these organizations meet together to plan and design future content and training opportunities.

• Algonquin Regional High School

• Ashland Decisions at Every Turn

• Ashland Health Department

• Boys and Girls Club of MetroWest

• Education Development Center

• Framingham Community Connections Coalition

• Framingham Health Department

It All Began in 2015…

when the Town of Hudson applied for a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health aimed at reducing youth alcohol use. The grant included the neighboring communities of Northborough, Southborough, and Framingham, and then eventually grew to include Ashland and Natick.

In the very beginning, our six communities worked to identify shared risk factors that contributed to the high levels of underage drinking in the region. What they found was that youth who did not report having a caring adult outside of school were not only more likely to use alcohol, but use other substance too, as well as engage other youth risk behaviors.

The collaborative formed the Caring Adults Action Team, a working group with members from the local youth serving organizations, faith-based leaders, Youth and Family Services, and health departments. The Caring Adults Action team determined that what adults needed was more knowledge and skills for building positive relationships with youth. To address this, the group brought in Andi Egmont, a positive youth development consultant with many years of experience working with youth, to share her knowledge with local adults who work with youth.

Working together with Andi, the Caring Adults Action Team trained close to 100 adults in 2017 and 2018, providing them skills to build strong relationships. Throught that process, Andi introduced the Caring Adults Action Team to the work of the Search Institute, an organization based in Minnesota focused on positive youth development. The Search Institute teaches the Developmental Relationships Framework; five elements that are essential for adults to express in order to facilitate caring relationships.

The Caring adults network…

was established initially as a means of keeping folks who have attended our trainings in the past connected with more information and future training opportunities. The idea has sense grown, and now includes the monthly newsletter, as well as social media postings through Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube.

We’ve all got a lot going on, and so many things coming into our inbox on a daily basis. That's why we created these social media accounts so we could send you little snip-its of information in some new and interesting ways. We feel strongly that our content be concise, and easy to comprehend. We also feel that it is important to feature youth voice as much as possible. Check out some of our media here.