Developmental Relationships Framework
A framework for the relationships young people need to express care, challenge growth, provide support, share power and expand possibilities.
Search Institute
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- training trusted adults and mentors
- improving youth work relationships
- checking whether support combines care, challenge and shared power
Three questions it helps teams ask
- How do adults show care in concrete ways?
- Where are young people challenged to grow with support?
- How are possibilities expanded beyond the programme?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Developmental Relationships Framework as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- relationships require boundaries and safeguarding
- care without power-sharing can become paternalistic
- adults need support, supervision and reflection