Alexandria's 2025 Youth Needs Assessment
In November 2025, the City of Alexandria released the 2025 Youth Needs Assessment. This assessment is a powerful snapshot of what matters most to Alexandria’s young people. More than 1,100 youth across the city were engaged as changemakers in a participatory action research process, sharing their voices, experiences, and solutions through surveys, 94 listening sessions, and collaborative analysis. Their input shines a light on the issues they care about most. This report will guide the development of Alexandria’s next Children and Youth Community Plan (CYCP), helping ensure that city leaders, schools, and community organizations center youth priorities and work together to build a more equitable, supportive, and youth-friendly city.
Read the Assessment.
Children & Youth Community Plan 2030
The findings from the Youth Needs Assessment will be used to shape the next Children and Youth Community Plan. After reviewing the Youth Needs Assessment, the Children, Youth, and Families Collaborative Commission (CYFCC), which oversees the Children & Youth Community Plan (CYCP), agreed that the next CYCP should focus on the issues that emerged the most during the Listening Sessions with youth: Affordability for All, Safety & Responsibility, and Supportive & Responsive Schools.
Over the coming months, we will form the work groups around each of these priorities to co-design solutions with partners based on youth recommendations and test new strategies.
How to Get Involved
If you would like to join these efforts to ensure that Alexandria is the best place for young people to grow up, then contact Chelsea Eickert at chelsea.eickert@alexandriava.gov or sign up here.
Children & Youth Community Plan (CYCP) 2025 and Reports
CYCP Impact Report 2021-2025
Out later in 2025, the CYCP Impact Report highlights Alexandria’s progress toward better outcomes for children and youth over the last four years. It shares key data trends, community accomplishments, and priorities for building a more equitable city where all young people can thrive.
Alexandria's Children & Youth Master Plan 2014 & Report
CYCP Goals, Strategies, & Implementation
Additional CYCP Materials
Unified Planning Among Key Organizations to Improve Lives
Alexandria prides itself on being a concerned, caring and engaged community – one which works collaboratively for the benefit of those who live here and the larger public interests. Alexandrians view themselves individually but also, as part of this larger collective wishing to improve the lives of all who live in the city.
In 2019, the “perfect storm” of opportunity presented itself when the timing of revisions to three major city-related plans coincided – the Alexandria City Public Schools’ (ACPS) Strategic Plan, the Department of Community and Human Services’ (DCHS) Children and Youth Master Plan (CYMP), and the Alexandria Health Department and the Partnership for a Healthier Alexandria’s Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP). These organizations established a Unified Planning Team in the spring of 2019 and found partnering to develop their plans collectively provided added value to each through the opportunity to maximize collective community engagement, use and focus on the most important data, and focus on shared outcomes.
The result of working together, instead of in isolation, should prove beneficial to all in Alexandria and serve as a model for future efforts in our community. We invite you to view the outcome of this unified planning work here.
While developing these plans is important, implementing them successfully is even more important. As a result, the Unified Planning Team will evolve into a Unified Implementation Team to continue the partnership during implementation of these plans over the next five years and continue to ensure alignment of actions, collective community engagement, use of data, and sharing of resources, when possible.