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History of the Kansas City Youth Worker’s Alliance
 YouthNet is committed to providing a wide variety of professional development opportunities for youth workers to enhance their knowledge and improve their skills. The most obvious form of this is our education and training initiative. Yet, as we trained youth workers some of the feedback that we heard consistently was that youth workers wanted and needed times in which they could get together to network, to discuss how things were going on the job and to bounce ideas off each other. Given this feedback and YouthNet’s commitment to youth workers, the idea for the Kansas City Youth Worker’s Alliance (YWA) originated in 2000. Initially, the Youth Worker’s Alliance was a loose affiliation of youth workers who felt it was important to meet on a consistent basis. Soon that group developed a mission and a vision and now the Youth Worker’s Alliance is evolving into a more formal association of youth workers who are committed to coming together to promote the profession of youth work through education, training, sharing of resources and public awareness so that the field of youth work will be recognized as an important and necessary profession that is vital in building the strengths and assets of young people.
In 2004, the Kansas City Youth Worker’s Alliance expanded its network and became a bi-state alliance by partnering with Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.) in Kansas City, Kansas. Y.O.U joined YouthNet as a co-sponsor for the YWA. One outcome of the Youth Worker Alliance is to provide an opportunity for youth workers to come together from both sides of the state line to promote the field of youth work. YouthNet strives to help the Youth Worker’s Alliance achieve its mission and vision.
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