No Man Is An Island

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- MEDITATION XVII: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne.

This Is Why Freechild Matters.

2009 marks the eighth year of Freechild Project's existence. During these years I have witnessed an explosion in the youth activism world, with more than a dozen organizations emerging to say, "We believe in young people changing the world!" The old dogs that were around before Freechild have widened their analysis to include more examples of youth changing the world than ever before. The new ones have much better websites than Freechild, running web 2.0 platforms that make me salivate. So in the face of these developments, does Freechild still matter? I think so, and this is why.

In the most simplistic ways, Freechild matters because we address both children and youth. We address both young people of color and white kids; wealthy and poor; people with fast Internet access and those without; activists and allies; knowledge and power. Those are the simplistic ways- but as always, there is a much deeper reason.

One of the most important possibilities of any of this work is the deepened understanding of children and youth about the world around them. That's both in terms of learning about the power they have to change that world as well as the general skills and knowledge they need to succeed throughout life. 

I believe there has been a radical disenfranchisement in the roles of young people throughout the history of Western society, and particularly since the Victorian era. Today that disenfranchisement is spun to such an extreme that we (adults) label it "apathy", and use it like a powerful double-edged sword against young people: "Youth today are so apathetic!" This is adultism as in its core form. I think it is important that children and youth come to understand that reality as they determine for themselves they are ready. I wasn't ready to understand it for a long time, and when I did come to know it I actually didn't want to understand it. It was too much, too different from what I already thought I knew, and as such it was offensive to my sensibilities, per se. And I know its offensive to many adults, as well as young people.

The Freechild Project was created with the intention of providing young people with the access they need to learn a more "true" story about their roles. It was intended to share with young people and their adult allies that yes, indeed, young people do have or can learn the knowledge, skills, energy, ideas, wisdom and capacity to change the world. This is more than just marching in the streets or waving picket signs, as some people idolized the 1960s and 70s to have been about. Instead it is learning about young people can, should, and must actually become infused and integrated throughout society in order to affect their voices into the world around them. Anywhere. All the time. Any topic. Any society. 

And that is the core notion behind the Freechild website: give young people unfettered access to knowledge and then allow them to interpret that however they want. The workshops I provide under The Freechild Project banner build upon that in order to reinforce that idea. That makes it my responsibility to craft a clear message about radical democracy and social change that is honest to the concept and not disingenuous to the actors I take inspiration from: Paulo Freire, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Counts, Myles Horton, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, and many, many others.

There is no less purpose than that. Sometimes I'm afraid people might see my conception as too high-minded; its not. This work begins in the streets, and comes to the classroom much, much later.

Time for Youth to Evaluate Youth Programs

Given the very real fiscal crises facing our communities' and national economies right now, hard decisions are having to be made. There is travesty inherent in these choices, as budgets for childrens' health insurance, teen pregnancy prevention, education, immunizations, and many other programs essential to meeting the essential rights of children are being cut or completely dismantled. These cuts will be among the first made, and I will say unequivocally that those cuts are ill-informed and misguided. Other programs are being cut, too. As President Obama called for, programs that have grown bloated on excess government funds are being called into questions for their effectiveness and apparent inability to create the change they were supposed to. Today I'm calling for a new measure of what efficacy actually is in youth programs.

For too long we've measured by youth programs by simplistic quantitative measures: number of participants served, amount of attendance, number of activities, and summaries of qualitative evaulations of activities. I have found that even when qualitative data is asked for it amounts to overly-simplistic or largely irrelevant markers in the lives of children and youth. We need new data points. I believe the programs that serve children and youth should be measured largely from the perspectives of children and youth. Not the outcomes of the programs on children and youth, but the perceptions of those young people participating themselves. Sure, other data can be collected as well, particularly in programs that have deliberative ends in mind that directly impact the larger community in addition the children and youth. However, any program that serves young people has an ethical obligation to wiegh those participants' perspectives as much, if not more, than anyone else.

If funders, including government agencies, private foundations and individual donors, insisted on this type of radical transformation schools and programs would be forced to respond. Their response could only lead to the creation of new approaches to successfully serving children and youth. Those adaptations are vital, and we must make spaces for them to happen. Its time for youth to evaluate youth programs.

Adultism Costs Too Much!

Over the last 25 years nonprofit organizations serving young people have grown exponentially by providing a variety of services for children and youth: tutoring, mentoring, recreation, leadership development, sports, skills-training, community service, teen nights, camping, drop-in programs, after-school programs, employment programs, dances, government programs, youth councils... the list goes on. During that time our society has hyper-structured the lives of young people, with time management becoming a prized commodity among some families, and visits to juvenile detention centers becoming routine for others. This type of hyper-structurizing is having dramatic effects on children and youth, and I think we're far from understanding the breadth of those effects.

In the meantime, we need to embrace new approaches to designing, implementing and evaluating the programs serving children and youth in order for those programs to survive. This is why youth involvement is going to become so much more important to our communities than ever before. Finally, for what seems like the first time in my almost 20-year career, I am seeing a practical, pragmatic lever that Youth Voice advocates can use in order to leverage the radical transformation needed to foster deepened, systematic and sustainable youth involvement. As my friend and ally Wendy Lesko pointed out so well, people under 18 make up at least 26% of the American population. However, in the historical shackles thrust upon them in our schools, youth-serving organizations and community groups we've been unable to leverage the strength, energy, wisdom and ability inherent in that huge portion of our nation, let alone worldwide.

In this time of social and economic transformation lets move forward beyond the traditional barriers. Let's deliberately move past segregating youth from the leadership of the organizations that exist to support them. Let's consciously build the partnerships children need to move our society forward. Let's intentionally transform the cultures structures that enforce adultism and adultcentrism. Why? Because we literally cannot afford to enforce them anymore! Adultism costs too much! 

There is so much money put into creating and managing adult-driven, adult-managed, adult-guided, adult-evaluated, adult-motivated, adult-centered programs for children and youth. Consider all the traditional youth programs in our schools and neighborhoods. Despite being designed with the best intentions in mind, these activities have largely produced mediocre results, as dropout rates continue to grow, disengagement continues to sting, and disenfrachisement continues to be enforced. They just aren't effective, and this ineffectiveness just costs too much. 

My research and practice over the last nine years especially has shown me that there is an alternative to this mess. That alternative is the systematic engagement of children and youth throughout society, including the all of the structures and cultures we rely on every single day. We must engage young people in the research, planning, teaching, evaluation, decision-making and advocacy our programs conduct every single day. We must engage children and youth as trainers and teachers for their peers and for adults. We must change the ways that adults percieve young peoples' abilities by actually infusing children and youth throughout the daily functioning of our society. We must create new opportunities for young people to support adults so that adults of all ilks can learn new behaviors, new attitudes and new ways of interacting with children and youth as partners. Then we can enfranchise generations of new voters, legions of new community volunteers, hoardes of new donors, and tons of new partners throughout all of our work to change the world.

This will get at the heart of some of those ineffective programs President Obama is after. This will strike at the cowardice inherent in adultism. This will transform our nation - and our world - forever. This is why I am going to act as and introduce myself as a "radical integrationist" from now on. Our society can't wait any longer.

Real Participation

In her ongoing consideration of global community development, Sabrina Karim says that "Real participation means recognition of how people already participate and using that to enhance their own personal liberty." I think this is kind of fatalist, because inside this statement is the idea that people are only what they currently know, rather than beings-in-motion. Recognizing how people currently participate in community development, including children and youth, often amounts to a grim acknowledgment of the inability of individuals within the greater community. This in turn may further disenfranchise or alienate potential beneficiaries from transforming their own roles within their communities. 

Rather than using our current notions of participation to create new realities, I believe that community development needs to be bold enough and hopeful enough to imagine, propose and create new realities. These must acknowledge where folks are coming from - but they can't get hung up in a stagnant notion of time and place. Rather, planners must expose participants/members/allies to others' current new realities and encourage them to envision their own. 

I have found it most successful to frame this possibility in the bedrock of democracy: when people believe they can play an integral role in their own futures they become more invested in their communities, as they vest themselves in the relationship between how they live and who and what they want to become. My hope is that we all see that responsibility in our development work, whether we're thinking about individuals or communities or our globe. That's the future I want to live in.

Love and Social Change

"At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love." Che Guevera isn't regarded as a mushy guy, and dropping his name into conversation carries implications that I don't mind associated with me. But I believe in the sentiment of this quote, because I believe that at the middle of all this work towards changing the world lies a force that is immense and beautiful. This idea about love is not just cliche or a millenial meme - instead, its a reality that pervades and perserves without pause and with a type of urgency that's neither anxious or tedious. 

In his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire explored different components of social change. Core to his vast theory was dialogue, the interaction of words between people. Freire believed dialogue was an essential force for change, and propositioned that "Dialogue cannot exist... in the absence of a profound love for the world and its people." This quibbet can serve as a meaningful lesson for any educator, youth worker or parent who is committed to being an adult ally to young people. 

bell hooks continues this lesson in her book, Outlaw Culture - Resisting Representations."The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others." Teaching young people about the power of love moves us against the oppressive forces of hate and anger that seem to teem from those who regard themselves as the most powerful activists today. 

Dr. King expanded on the basis of this idea as he spoke in 1967 in New York City. He explain that, "When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality." 

I want to let today serve as a reminder that we all need to be moving towards that ultimate reality, and we know that key is accessible. Let's use it.

The Freechild Project Agenda

Apparently I am involved in "the hijacking of state schools." If I'm to have any role in a takeover anywhere in society, let me start here by stating deliberately what that agenda should look like. First let's start with The Freechild Project Vision, circa 2009.

Transformed roles for young people throughout society. The way our world views children and youth is moved past them being seen and treated as passive recipients. Instead, all young people in all communities around the entire world become engaged in civic, social, educational, economic and other avenues central to the livelihood of society.

Now, to get there we all must do some work. Adultism must be overcome. Young people must be engaged. The imagination of everyone everywhere must be enlivened in a conscious struggle to embrace the wide array of possibilities young people inherently encapsulate, and that consciousness must be transformed into deliberation, specificity and outcomes that reflect the gloriously challenging, tremendously hopeful and hugely powerful possibilities that live inside of complete youth/adult partnerships. 

That cannot just be done through one website, or a dozen. Instead, and luckily, the work is already underway in thousands of communities around the world. Its being seeded by hundreds of organizations and programs, and its being led by the multitudes who are committed to seeing this Agenda come to fruition. You may even already be a part of it.

Here is the Freechild Project Agenda:

1. Intentional Acknowledgment of the Power of Young People. We live in times that are challenging, to say the least. For more than a half century the power of children and youth has been shown to be a powerful and successful avenue for creative, inventive and successful social change. As a society we need to deliberately acknowledge, embrace and enliven that power in every way possible. Let's set forth to say to young people everywhere, "We believe in you. We will actively support and partner with you. You aren't just the future - we need you RIGHT NOW. Please join us in this collective struggle for a better world."
2. Equitable Opportunities for Engagement. Opportunities for children and youth need to be created, fostered, supported and sustained throughout society where their roles are equitable to those of adults: that may mean voting rights, salaries, signatory authority, training or any other mechansim that acknowledges the unique positions young people occupy in our society.
3. Deliberate Struggling with Discrimination. The cold realities of explicit discrimination impact children and youth before anyone else: adultism starts in the crib, as babies are coddled in dehumanizing ways, taught to respond to the adultcentric gestures of well-meaning but poorly informed parents. As each of us has grown up we've been expected to grow accustomed to this treatment, and the subsequent layers compounded on top of it, including sexism, racism, classism and more. There must be conscious and deliberate efforts to struggle with the effects of that early discrimination, as well as its causes. Then we must challenge and overcome not the oppressors but the oppression itself. This is not a struggle against adults - its a challenge we must take up together, young people and adults of all ages. 
4. Interaction with the Broad Array of Educational Avenues. Schools are often seen as "the way" education happens in our society. However, I believe that is an overly-simplistic anti-analysis, as schools are merely one of many challenges at work. The most powerful educational avenue in our society is actually social marketing, which acts as a defacto teacher in every area of our lives- schools included. Children, youth and adults must work together to create alternate messaging that moves towards the vision stated above. By usurping mainstream messaging that treats young people either as violent supercriminals or as incapable infants, children, youth and adults can become powerful players who create the avenues through which we can broadcast the future. When lightpoles are acknowledged as powerful medium and graffiti is seen for its value as a textbook we'll be getting somewhere. Seriously.
   

These are just the opening salvos in a much larger diatribe. Let me know if you want to hear the rest: we've got to develop our vision- together.

Youth Voice: A Right or Responsibility?

Young people, working with adults as partners, have the ability and capacity to cure the world of all of its ills. Sickness, famine, poverty, war, environmental catastrophe and economic meltdown can all be answered by the energy, idealism, knowledge, power, and wisdom of children and youth. Nothing is over the heads, hearts or hands of young people today, and they demonstrate that everyday in the ways they are living their lives.

Youth Voice is the active, distinct, and concentrated ways young people represent themselves throughout society. It is this voice taken through the Cycle of Youth Engagement that answers the challenges of society every single day. So my question is whether Youth Voice is a right or a responsibility. In a time when every single issue feels glaring and the planet is apparently at a tipping point do the adult allies of young people have any alternative than to engage young people in working towards transforming this grand clustermess? By not engaging them are we being more than unresponsive- are we actually being irresponsible? 

Moreso, with that state of the times in mind, is Youth Voice a right or a responsibility? I would argue that our society can no longer wait for children and youth to wait for us, the adults who are taking our time getting to them to engage their voices. This may be foisting an undue amount of responsibility on the shoulders of the young, but honestly, aren't we doing that already by ignoring the major issues awaiting them as adults? 

These are some of the major issues entwined in Youth Voice, ones that go beyond the generalized and unsophisticated conversations we've been having for the last 10 years I've been in the this national movement. Its time to crack this egg open.

Effects of Oversharing on Youth Voice

Is there ever such a thing as "too much" Youth Voice? I don't think I'll live to see that panned out, but for the sake of exploring the idea let's take a look back at the phenomenom of oversharing. Its popularly used to described when someone gives too much information about any given topic, particularly in their personal lives. However, last week I was at a meeting where an adult suggested that having youth at conferences causes us to "overshare them," and she was concerned that we didn't want youth out there "too much. I just can't stand to think of the kids being so bored with adult stuff." This overt gesture towards protectionism and patriarchy was cloaked a deep adultism, the belief that exposing young people to "adult" topics and conversations automatically disengages youth or otherwise scars them. But the idea that young people themselves can be "overshared" is what bothered me most, and its where the adultism glares most at me.

Young people are not property or chattel to be controlled or metted out as an adult sees fit. The idea that someone can control when, how, where and why a young person shares their ideas, experiences, knowledge and wisdom is ludicrous and demeaning, to say the least. I understand the concept of "my youth" because I ran a lot of programs for children and youth. In a world where there are so many competing interests in the lives of youth its difficult not to serve as a protector in the lives of young people, particularly when they come from environments without appropriate adult figures in their lives. Its easy to develop that best intention and easy way of believing we know what's best for them. I know that, because I have done that. But that doesn't make it right all the time, and Youth Voice is one of those. 

We have an ethical obligation to earnestly throw the doors open. Now, it takes time to ensure young people are prepared for what's beyond those doors, including training and education and mentoring and all those things. But that's for young people to decide with us, not for us to decide alone. The effect of oversharing on Youth Voice needs to be one of those learnings that young people help us decifer for themselves, not for us to decide for them. Let's consider that in earnest before simply closing the door and hoping for no more.

The Privilege of Youth Involvement

Youth boards, youth staff members, youth evaluators, youth advisors, youth researchers, youth trainers... all examples of ways to engage Youth Voice in organizations, and all privileged. The nature of youth involvement is one of privilege and exclusivity. This can be a difficult idea to grasp, but let's think about it: for every one youth who is actively engaged in decision-making or leadership or empowerment activities of any time, there are dozens and hundreds more who aren't. All that said, it is a privilege to be involved. Having deliberate opportunities to share Youth Voice with adults and throughout society is a particularly important thing, and that's the point of this post: adults must understand that young people have these particularly powerful opportunities and that we have an ethical obligation to spread these opportunities throughout our society. 

A consideration.

On Youth Liberation

There is an element within the Youth Voice Movement that believes any youth voice equates to all youth voice. These are the well-meaning folks who invite one youth to join their board; one youth panel to speak at their conference. The challenge inherent in this practice is that one young person cannot and should not be expected to represent all young people. Children and youth are simply too diverse, too expansive to be embodied in single-person representation, in any of its myriad forms.

In the same way there are a group of youth voice advocates who believe that all young people should be allowed to choose their own way all the time, and that this is equivelant to social justice. This translates to allowing all young people in all schools, community centers, places of worship, and neighborhoods around the world to do whatever they wish, whenever they wish, wherever they wish, however they wish. I can hear certain readers say, "Surely there is nobody who is really like that, right? No one believes all those things to that extreme!" To them I say that surely there are, and I've learned a lot from them, calling many good friends and close allies. Those good friends are reading this, too, and wondering exactly where I'm heading here, as we've often converged with our thinking.

Let me say that I believe in youth liberation; however, I believe in it in the same sense I believe in freedom (thus, the "Freechild Project"): we are all complexly interwoven into a fabric of interdependence, and because of that we have to rely on one another for our independence. An aboriginal activst group in Australia in the 1970s came up with a creedo describing this idea far better than I ever could: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come to because your liberation is bound up in mine, we can work together." 

Additionally, I do believe that the main station/duty/responsibility/right of young people is to learn- whether from each other, from adults, from culture or wherever. I would go so far to say that is a privilige of youth, that ability to focus on that task. I don't believe in the compulsory, forced obligation we thrust upon young people today, making them attend schools and participate in educational programs in which their volition is inherently compromised. I think that is nothing less than a failure of adults who have no idea how to make education a fun, engaging and powerful experience that young people should be compelled to participate in because of their own will rather than that of adults. However, I do believe young people have that responsibility to learn, to grow and to be themselves.

So its a tricky path that currently offers me no clear resolution and few absolutes. However, I believe that this idea of youth liberation as complete emancipation from adults is disingenuous, to say the least. I will continue to explore that notion later.