Author: Jordy Johnson, MSW, Youth-Centered Profiles Specialist
Youth-Centered Profiles (YCP) are a creative and youth-driven approach to adoption recruitment that allows older youth in foster care to take an active role in shaping how they are represented to potential adoptive families. Instead of relying solely on adults to tell their story, YCP invites youth to share their voice, interests, personality, and identity through videos, photos, writing, and other expressive components that feel true to who they are. Youth ages 12 and older who meet the criteria and want to participate work directly with the YCP Specialist across a series of conversations that prioritize trust, reflection, and choice. Using a trauma-informed framework, the process helps youth explore what permanency means to them, what they want families to know, and how they want to be seen. In every step, the youth’s perspective leads the way, making the final profile something they can recognize themselves in and feel proud to share.
The purpose of a YCP is simple but meaningful: to give older youth a real voice in their own recruitment and help them feel genuinely involved in how their story is shared. Many youth have felt unsure about the recruitment process or disconnected from how adults have described them in the past. YCP changes that by creating an intentional, youth-led space where they can talk about themselves in their own words and choose what they want included. During engagement meetings, youth help decide which creative components they want to use, whether that’s an interview, photos, artwork, playlists, writing, or other pieces that reflect who they are day-to-day. They review and approve everything, set their own boundaries, and decide how they want to be represented. While traditional profiles are a great introduction and serve an essential role in recruitment, a YCP adds another layer by capturing a youth’s personality, humor, and strengths in their own unique way. By being involved from start to finish, youth gain a stronger sense of ownership and feel more connected to their own permanency journey. Most importantly, YCP shifts the dynamic from adults speaking about youth to youth speaking for themselves, which is at the heart of why this process exists.
As the YCP Specialist, some of my favorite parts of this work come from the time I get to spend with the kids themselves. I’ve loved sitting together and listening to all kinds of music, building playlists, and hearing the stories or memories tied to certain songs. I also have a lot of fun coming up with creative ways to show who they are, like the video-game-style video I made with one youth so he could “visit” the places on his bucket list. And honestly, a lot of the best moments are just the simple ones: grabbing a sweet treat at a coffee shop while we look over their YCP projects, playing Uno while they tell me about their goals, taking a little road trip to a NASCAR race and singing to the radio the whole way there, or planning a school-night adventure to a college basketball game. Every youth brings something different, and getting to help them express that in their own way is one of my favorite parts of this role.
This year’s National Adoption Month theme, Honoring Youth: Strengthening Pathways for Lasting Bonds, aligns closely with what YCP is all about. NAM highlights the need for adoptive families for teens and reminds us how important it is to center young people in conversations about their own lives. YCP fits naturally within that message; it creates space for youth to share who they are, what they care about, and how they want to be seen, while also empowering them to take an active role in their own permanency journey.
If you’d like to view our Youth-Centered Profiles, you can do so here: https://adoptkskids.org/Youth-Centered-Profiles/