The Changing Lives Program is a positive youth development intervention originally created for marginalized and troubled adolescents. It was developed and refined by William M. Kurtines, Marilyn Montgomery, and their students in the Miami Youth Development Project at Florida International University starting in the mid 1990s. The program used a co-participatory group counseling model that evolved through work with youth attending alternative high schools in Miami-Dade County. The alternative schools functioned as a “last stop” for students at risk of school dropout. The aim of the CLP was to empower these young people to change the direction of their lives for the better.
Program Theory
The Changing Lives Program's empowerment approach was based on the idea that a positive sense of identity provides direction and purpose to the life course. When young people face difficult life choices, the sense of identity they have formed provides them with a guidance system with which to make these choices. Over time, the effects of life choices accumulate to create a path through life, referred to as a life course. In other words, one way to have a positive influence on a young person's future life course is to nurture that person's developing sense of identity in adolescence.
The Changing Lives Program's strategy for promoting positive identity development was to facilitate mastery experiences. Mastery experiences are experiences of success that follow perseverant effort. Such experiences change how people think of themselves and what they are capable of, including their beliefs about their power for self-change. The mastery experiences the Changing Lives Program sought to facilitate were specifically those associated with identifying life challenges, creating solutions to them, and enacting these solutions. Thus, program's intervention strategy was to facilitate mastery experiences by engaging adolescents in the challenge of solving problems in their lives.
Program Theory
The Changing Lives Program's empowerment approach was based on the idea that a positive sense of identity provides direction and purpose to the life course. When young people face difficult life choices, the sense of identity they have formed provides them with a guidance system with which to make these choices. Over time, the effects of life choices accumulate to create a path through life, referred to as a life course. In other words, one way to have a positive influence on a young person's future life course is to nurture that person's developing sense of identity in adolescence.
The Changing Lives Program's strategy for promoting positive identity development was to facilitate mastery experiences. Mastery experiences are experiences of success that follow perseverant effort. Such experiences change how people think of themselves and what they are capable of, including their beliefs about their power for self-change. The mastery experiences the Changing Lives Program sought to facilitate were specifically those associated with identifying life challenges, creating solutions to them, and enacting these solutions. Thus, program's intervention strategy was to facilitate mastery experiences by engaging adolescents in the challenge of solving problems in their lives.
To engage adolescents in solving life problems, the Changing Lives Program used participatory co-learning. Adult group facilitators collaborated with adolescent group members as co-learners who each brought their own life expertise. Participatory co-learning brought together adolescents' experiential knowledge of the social worlds of their schools and neighborhoods with adults’ experiential knowledge of the world outside of these schools and neighborhoods. Together, adolescents and adults talked through the life problems the adolescents brought to the group to identify the right problems to solve, the ones that, if solved, would actually lead to the changes they wanted in their lives, as opposed to the problems that other people in their lives wanted them to solve. With the help of the group, adolescents re-worked their life problems into life change goals and identified the transformative actions they would take to achieve these life change goals. Group members supported each other in their attempts to change their lives for the better.
In short, the Changing Lives Program theory can be summarized like this:
In short, the Changing Lives Program theory can be summarized like this:
- Transformative Actions --> Mastery Experiences --> Positive Identity --> Positive Life Course Change
Does the Changing Lives Program Work?
Small to medium-sized quasi-experimental outcome trials of the Changing Lives Program have yielded promising findings among troubled adolescents. An initial evaluation showed that intervention participants increased in critical problem-solving competence and sense of control over and responsibility for life choices, compared to participants in a comparison condition (Ferrer-Wreder et al., 2002). Subsequent outcome studies with new samples found evidence of a similar pattern of intervention-related gains in proactive information-seeking, critical problem-solving competence, and control and responsibility regarding life choices (Eichas et al., 2010, 2017; Maximin, 2012). In addition, participants’ end of session ratings of the participatory co-learning processes that took place in the session predicted positive pre to posttest change in subjective well-being (Eichas et al., 2021).
These studies also found evidence that participating in the intervention buffered against losses in emotion-focused life goal exploration (e.g., exploring whether pursuing a particular life goal actualizes one’s best potentials). Participating in the intervention was also associated with an increased probability that youth described the subjective meaning and significance of their most important life goals in terms of a self-actualizing purpose (for example: “I want to help people, I inherited it, and I am meant to do it.”) rather than a self-satisfying one (for example: “Travel a lot. Explore the World. Having freedom,” Eichas et al., 2015, p. 349).
Most recently, a randomized controlled trial of a culturally adapted version of the Changing Lives Program in Iran for at-risk adolescents showed evidence of intervention gains in dimensions of identity development and indicators of social integration and reductions in risky behaviors and negative emotions (Habibi et al., in preparation).
Beyond Troubled Adolescents: Changing Lives Programs for College Students
Over time, as it became clear that all young people face difficult challenges in defining a life direction, the Changing Lives Program was adapted for more general populations of young people, namely college students. The Exploration Enhancement Workshop (Schwartz et al., 2005), Making Life Choices Program (Berman et al., 2025), The Miami Adult Development Project (Meca et al., 2014), the Making Career and Education Choices Workshop (Meca et al., 2025), and the Bay Area Adult Development Project (Soh et al., 2025) adopted intervention strategies drawn from the Changing Lives Program and employed them in work with various college student samples in various formats. Some programs were developed as part of college courses and have used college students as peer facilitators. Other programs used graduate student facilitators and took place outside of any college course.
Despite differences in format, the programs shared a participatory co-learning approach for engaging students in thinking about their life challenges and life choices. Outcome evaluations of these programs have consistently shown intervention-related gains in dimensions of identity formation, included cognitive and emotion-focused exploration (Schwartz et al., 2005), identity status and sense of control (Berman et al., 2008, 2025), and commitment formation and maintenance (Meca et al., 2025; Soh et al., 2025), as well as reduced identity distress (Meca et al., 2014).
Small to medium-sized quasi-experimental outcome trials of the Changing Lives Program have yielded promising findings among troubled adolescents. An initial evaluation showed that intervention participants increased in critical problem-solving competence and sense of control over and responsibility for life choices, compared to participants in a comparison condition (Ferrer-Wreder et al., 2002). Subsequent outcome studies with new samples found evidence of a similar pattern of intervention-related gains in proactive information-seeking, critical problem-solving competence, and control and responsibility regarding life choices (Eichas et al., 2010, 2017; Maximin, 2012). In addition, participants’ end of session ratings of the participatory co-learning processes that took place in the session predicted positive pre to posttest change in subjective well-being (Eichas et al., 2021).
These studies also found evidence that participating in the intervention buffered against losses in emotion-focused life goal exploration (e.g., exploring whether pursuing a particular life goal actualizes one’s best potentials). Participating in the intervention was also associated with an increased probability that youth described the subjective meaning and significance of their most important life goals in terms of a self-actualizing purpose (for example: “I want to help people, I inherited it, and I am meant to do it.”) rather than a self-satisfying one (for example: “Travel a lot. Explore the World. Having freedom,” Eichas et al., 2015, p. 349).
Most recently, a randomized controlled trial of a culturally adapted version of the Changing Lives Program in Iran for at-risk adolescents showed evidence of intervention gains in dimensions of identity development and indicators of social integration and reductions in risky behaviors and negative emotions (Habibi et al., in preparation).
Beyond Troubled Adolescents: Changing Lives Programs for College Students
Over time, as it became clear that all young people face difficult challenges in defining a life direction, the Changing Lives Program was adapted for more general populations of young people, namely college students. The Exploration Enhancement Workshop (Schwartz et al., 2005), Making Life Choices Program (Berman et al., 2025), The Miami Adult Development Project (Meca et al., 2014), the Making Career and Education Choices Workshop (Meca et al., 2025), and the Bay Area Adult Development Project (Soh et al., 2025) adopted intervention strategies drawn from the Changing Lives Program and employed them in work with various college student samples in various formats. Some programs were developed as part of college courses and have used college students as peer facilitators. Other programs used graduate student facilitators and took place outside of any college course.
Despite differences in format, the programs shared a participatory co-learning approach for engaging students in thinking about their life challenges and life choices. Outcome evaluations of these programs have consistently shown intervention-related gains in dimensions of identity formation, included cognitive and emotion-focused exploration (Schwartz et al., 2005), identity status and sense of control (Berman et al., 2008, 2025), and commitment formation and maintenance (Meca et al., 2025; Soh et al., 2025), as well as reduced identity distress (Meca et al., 2014).