My Professional Biography

My professional work with youth began in 1989 when I was 14 with a local nonprofit in North Omaha, Nebraska. I worked for them over the next 7 years teaching drama programs and leading after school programs and a basketball program. My activism began when I was 15 when I started an environmental justice group at my high school as a protest against the existing science club. My systems change efforts focused on meaningful youth involvement started when I was young, as well, founding a youth council for my neighborhood when I was 17. I have continued working both inside and outside of systems since. 

Since 1998 I have worked with approximately 50,000 children, youth and adults, focusing on youth engagement, meaningful student involvement, community organizing and service learning. Through a variety of speaking, professional development, training and program development activities. My activities have reached almost 250 elementary, middle and high schools, along with more than 300 nonprofit organizations across the United States and Canada, and in United Kingdom and Brazil. I have consulted more than 100 schools on how to effectively infuse youth voice in service learning. Aside from schools and nonprofits, I have also worked with foundations, government agencies, colleges and universities, publishing companies, and other organizations. My writing has included more than 100 different items, including educational materials, website content, curricula, training manuals, promotional materials, grant proposals and evaluation reports. After founding The Freechild Project in 2001 and SoundOut in 2002 I began working with clients locally, nationally and internationally. I have written extensively for both websites, developing site navigation, content, and publications to offer specifically to their target audiences. I have used social media extensively for Freechild, incorporating technologies such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and delicious into the fray. I have designed projects, written guides, evaluated programs, and provided an array of public speaking, professional development, youth training, consulting and technical assistance to thousands of children, youth and adults since then. I founded a national nonprofit organization in 2007 that was focused on youth engaging, serving as the executive director for two years. Working with a variety of volunteers and professional partners, I obtained 501(c)3 status from the IRS, established a variety of local, national and international relations, upheld professional obligations, and secured a variety of funding supports.

My work in the area of school improvement has continued to grow over the last 10 years. It began when I served as the first-ever Student Engagement Specialist at the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction starting in 2001. There I developed and led a statewide action research project focused on engaging students as partners in education decision-making in state-level administrative processes and school improvement planning. I developed an introductory guide and a website for the state, as well. After completing my bachelor's degree focused on critical pedagogy, youth studies and community development at The Evergreen State College, in 2006 I began my graduate studies in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington College of Education. Since 2008 I have worked as the Coordinated School Health Manager at the Washington State Department of Health. In that capacity I have served as a liaison between the DOH and the state education agency, facilitating interagency collaboration focused on an array of school health issues. I am also the agency's lead school health policy analyst, leading agency-wide reviews of state and federal legislation and rule-making. My budget management activities, supported by an interagency agreement funded with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant, include interagency agreements and external contracts, negotiations, sub-contracts, federal reports, program deliverables and evaluation. As the co-founder and co-coordinator of the Washington State Coordinated School Health Network, I facilitate professional development, technical assistance, and information-sharing activities for a variety of partners in K-12 schools, districts, within state agencies and at local health departments across Washington. I am also co-coordinator of the Washington Youth School Health Cadre, the co-chair of Washington Action for Healthy Kids, and the coordinator of Students Taking Charge, a student-driven school health improvement program working in several schools across the state. 

I have served several terms of community and national service. In 2000 I participated in a fellowship program for the Points of Light Foundation and was the Youth Engaged in Service Ambassador for Washington State. My service in AmeriCorps ended with a term as an AmeriCorps Leader with the Corporation for National Service lasted from 1999-00. In that capacity I worked with the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps in Taos, New Mexico. My terms as an AmeriCorps Member included an individual placement running a ropes challenge course on the Hood Canal for the Washington Service Corps out of Tacoma, Washington and as an AmeriCorps Member with the Changing Trends AmeriCorps Program in Lincoln, Nebraska. In that term I created a tutoring and mentoring program for Kurdish and Iraqi refugee students.

Outdoor education, team building, and experiential learning were a major area of emphasis early in my career. My first work as a ropes challenge course director was for Boy Scout Camp Cornhusker in DuBois, Nebraska in 1996. For two years I worked as a Teacher/Naturalist at Pioneer Park Nature Center in Lincoln, Nebraska from 1996 to 1998. I was a Ropes Challenge Course Director Certification Instructor at the National Camping School in Spokane, Washington in 1998, and operated the COPE Course at Camp Hahobas in Belfair, Washington, for two years. I directed summer nature programs at Camp Cedars in Fremont, Nebraska, and Camp Kitaki in Louisville, Nebraska prior to that.

Other youth work I have done has included operating a youth center for the City of Tumwater, Washington, in 1998 and 1999. From 1995 to 1997 I worked as an Independent Living Skills Instructor for the YWCA in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was a Teen Floor Attendant for a drug treatment facility operated by CentrePointe, Inc. in Lincoln, Nebraska.

I have served a number of organizations as a committed volunteer and activist. I have served as an advisor for the Olympia parks and recreation department, and for a local nonprofit organization called Partners in Prevention Education. After 10 years of service to the National Youth Rights Association, I was named a director emeritus in 2009, and am a founding advisor of the Institute for Democratic Education in America. I am a contributing editor to the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, an academic journal. I am a board member for Kijana Voices, and serve as an advisor to the Patchwork School in Colorado. I have also been a volunteer teacher at the Olympia Free School and tabled for the Nebraskans for Peace Alternatives to the Military committee.

This is my professional biography. Let me know what you think!

Making Public Policy

The levers of public policy aren't often considered when it comes to youth involvement and youth voice. Sure, there is a group of America's Youth Councils that is rallying the nation's youth councils to unite and take action and everything - and I'm with them 100%. But honestly, what this movement needs are strategic agendas that are designed to secure actual support from actual politicians in order to foster actual change.

Governments at all levels across the US can create changes in law, rules and regulations in order to promote youth voice and youth involvement. Those policy changes could look like this:

• Local, county, regional, state, and federal governments mandated to create policies that ensure youth civic engagement;
• Lower the federal voting age from 18 to 12;
• All federal agencies that affect young people must create an Office of Student Engagement to foster youth involvement in the management, evaluation, programs, planning, research and decision-making of programs affecting them;
• Eliminate all age restrictions on public office;
• Create youth-adult partnership councils for all substantive public offices, including state governors, city councils, and more.

These are just simple ideas. More complex governmental change strategies must be designed to meet the realistic and practical goals of government, in order for advocates to successfully navigate the complex inner workings of democratic government. Making public policy is the one step of many to re-envision the roles of young people throughout society. 

The Silence of the Children

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them." - John Holt

A young man, maybe 8, sat quietly for the first 10 minutes of a half hour of reading time. Suddenly he discovered that his reading foundation logo sticker fit perfectly over his mouth. Looking at his neighbor he wiggled and began talking to her through the sticker, and she giggled. First a teacher swarmed to his side, sternly looking at him until he sat still. Then another adult sat beside him, and the first left. This is a perfect metaphor for a program I attended last night.

For an hour I attended an elementary school's reading night program with my girlfriend and her kids. Sponsored by a local reading foundation, the agenda for the evening began with the school's black, brown, and white students singing an anthem about love for the world. It was very kind, and from their mouths it felt sincere and real. However, the tone for the evening was really set in their follow-up, the school principal, a well-dressed white man nearing retirement, speaking to a diverse crowed of apparently working class parents and students. After he clicked off instructions, many of the kids and parents swarmed to the school cafeteria, where they were read to by a librarian and a teacher. Afterwards a yellow bear mascot floated around the roam while students alternated between stations, making bookmarks, eating cookies and picking books to keep.

The books were used. The milk served with the cookies was standard issue school lunch fare. The teachers were uninspired, though well-meaning. Students were crammed into sitting in the center of the multipurpose room, which at that moment had all the allure of a gym, but all the seriousness of a library. While the students were in the middle, adults congregated along the outside of the group, standing in awkward clumps, jostling for position to watch their "little learners" (as one teacher referred to them), or meandered around the room entertaining young children (the sitting was explicitly for kids older than 4, and as old as 3rd grade). 

I understand good intentions, and I've perpetuated more than my share. In my capacity at the state health department I constantly have the opportunity to propagate these characteristics through grant-making, curriculum writing and policy development. That does not release me from my critical responsibility to ask for a more democratic, more responsible way to educate students.

Simply arriving in a school and dropping books on the heads of kids doesn't make for a successful reading program. Even couched in teaching parents how to read to kids or decorated with cookies and mascots, these programs are at best designed to meet the needs of greedy adults whose apparent need to see themselves as useful in the lives of children overrides their own well-intentioned ideas about how to make their lives better.

Rather than driving children to distraction, these programs could potentially help young people re-envision their roles and purpose as learners and leaders throughout society. One-on-one reading between parents and students, coaching from teachers and reading specialists, and activities designed to get kids active and reinforce their commitment to reading and learning could complete a learning cycle of empowerment. By actively engaging kids and parents together as co-readers, co-teachers and active partners, these events could have a truly revolutionary effect, particularly in a climate as disengaging as a traditional suburban elementary school.

The reality is that distractions of the setting, the culture created by the authoritarianism and adultism, and the ill-conceived program of action are singularly to blame for students' "bad" behavior and disinterest in reading. As ethical parents, teachers, and co-participants with young people, we have to accept responsibility and take action to change this paradigm throughout our society. It is inherently unethical to be anything less fully engaged in the struggle for educational transformation, and social change, if we know there is a different way. And we know there is. 

Starting Right Here

When I'm out working with youth orgs and schools across the country on youth engagement I am often asked "Where do we start?" Questions about who and why and how shake in there, but the answer I consistently tell folks is simple: Start right here, and start right now.

There is one person in your life who can affect engagement more than anyone else, and that is YOU. You alone are responsible for determining what, why, how and who you are connected to. You alone have the power you need to create change in the lives of others - and in your own life. Where better to begin?

I ain't no perfect man - I whittle away my fair share of hours in the coal mines of my life. But starting here now I am determined to do it differently by actively engaging in every facet of my existence. If I'm digging, I'm looking for diamonds.

How about you?

-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com

The Tyranny of Freedom

"To me, it brings a feeling of pity and concern when I interact with families who experience the 'tyranny of freedom,' in which children can do everything: They scream, write on walls, threaten guests, because of the complacent authority of parents who actually think of themselves as champions of freedom." - Paulo Freire

There are young people today who care less about changing their own lives, let alone the world. They feel disconnected and dis-concerned about the society they live, belong to and benefit from. Growing up, they are surrounded by the opulence of consumption and the facade of success, allowing them to grow comfortable, complacent and disconnected from the world they live in.

We have to provide opportunities for these youth to connect to others in meaningful, substantive and real ways. And don't get me wrong, I'm not name-calling here: the inability these young people have to relate to the realities of the world they live in with the rest of us is not reflective of narcissism insomuch as it's reflective of a society-wide malaise fostered by generations of crass consumerism, social alienation and growing antipathy towards social responsibility.

This is a call for those who care to invest in those who apparently don't; these is a request for those who act to take action for those who won't; this is a hope that we can engage, create, critically examine and re-construct the world we live in - together. The "tyranny of freedom" is that it's not free at all; it's that no one is free until everyone is free; it's that freedom isn't free - everyone of us pays the price everyday, consciously or unconsciously. Let's wake up and get it together.

Is This A Movement?

One of the realities of this work focused on youth engagement/youth voice/youth involvement/youth empowerment is that it is going on everywhere, and it has been going on for a long time. Traveling the country for the last ten years I have seen a consistent surge of energy, only to be tampered now, during this economic downturn. But even now these efforts linger, waiting... But the existence of a bunch of stuff in a bunch of places doesn't necessarily make it a movement, does it?

Recently several authors and theorists have posed the idea that movements today exist without leaders, per se. Theorists Negri and Hardt's 2004 book, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, took that idea at its core to explain the rise of resistance around the world at that time. Seth Godin's Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, takes what is essentially the same concept and applies it to business. In thinking about all I've seen with these efforts across the country and around the world, I wonder if we need to take a similar tact in describing this "movement," too.

Some of you may remember a meeting I hosted in Washington, D.C. five years ago where I asked the same question as the title of this entry. We came to no conclusions then - but I'm closer. Stay tuned!

MLK Day Speech: Too Late

"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with a fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time...The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the floods; it ebbs....Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: Too Late."

When Dr. King wrote those words in 1963 the United States was being torn apart by hatred and bigotry. The consistently painful suffering of racism and the hypocritical denial of democracy could not be denied in the face of such a movement as Dr. King stood at the forefront, and through the actions of thousands change came. It is not complete, and as Senator Obama said in 2006, "We have not yet arrived at this longed for place. For all the progress we have made, there are times when the land of our dreams recedes from us..."

Despite that unsolved crisis of possibility, progress has been made. And it's from that progress that we should take hope.

Our movement is different from the civil rights movement, but it is the same, too. We are both fighting against visible discrimination: one against the color of a person's skin, the other against a person's apparent age. We are both fighting against segregation: one for race-based integration, the other for age-based integration. We are both working for a greater good beyond our own identity-based politics that is built on hope, nonviolence, justice and democracy, in the truest sense of the word.

But we stand at the ebb of the tide, the edge of a fault line, and the top of a precipice. It seems that just as adults throughout our society begin to grapple with the prospect that all children and youth should be treated with the respect of full humanity, our young people themselves are shooting towards the future without the assistance of said adults. They don't need our permission to build the Internet anymore. They don't need our acknowledgement to make the latest band the biggest thing out there. They don't need our angst to fuel their creativity or our placating gestures to achieve their dreams. Technology is rapidly enabling youth to have a growing sense of self-determination. Period. Their ability to transmit, relay, create and transform knowledge is greater than ever before. Within the last decade we have seen youth movements around the world lead to change, with hundreds of thousands of youth in Chile walking out on bad schools and students being instrumental in the pro-democracy movement in Iran. The American government knows the abilities of these exotic-ized stories, with Secretary Clinton herself speaking to an Alliance of Youth Movements summit in Mexico City. As Robert Kennedy alluded to, there must be tremendous value in youth empowerment to American foreign policy if one of the Secretary of State is fostering a belief in engaging young people.

However, within this country we routinely and grossly underestimate the energy, ability and power of young people to create positive social change within the communities they live in. Relegated to feel-good community service projects and segregated in low-value age-segregated educational factories across the nation, this country continues to try to teach children and youth that they are merely the recipients of the society they live in, the inheritors of something worth preserving and maintaining for all time. However, this flies in the face of the dynamicism of youth and the realities of the present. The fact of the matter is that high schools students in Lake Oswego, Oregon aren't waiting for adults to change: they're taking their fight against the town's curfew law, which is based on age discrimination, to the US Supreme Court. Youth across the country are organizing for better educations than what they're getting now. And yes, young people today are leading their own organizations to create change.

The inherent tension between these realities brings me back to Dr. King's message.

"One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."

We must stay awake in the face of the changes young people are making throughout our society right now, and work to support, sustain and enhance their efforts. Every adult can be an ally to youth. If we do not take steps to make that a reality, then shame on us for fulfilling the epitaph Dr. King suggested we would face, if only because of our own ignorance: "Too Late."

The Danger of Hype

Young people grow up in high pressure environments. There is pressure at home, pressure at school, and pressure throughout our communities. Buy stuff, get good grades, be like everyone else, please your parents... it's a steam cooker.

Many youth programs seek to appeal to youth by replicating this pressure. We bring in high energy speakers, we load up in action packed agendas, and we strive to engage youth with the steam they feel from the cooker of their daily lives. The hype involved with these approaches is all around, everywhere.

The danger to this hype is that: it's hype. At the end of the day when young people go home, when they look themselves in the mirror, find their eyes alone at night, that's when decisions about life are made. The hype melts away and reality sets in.

We must teach beyond the hype and reach into the hearts and minds of young people with real learning. Rather than assuming children and youth can only be appealed to through the lowest common denominator we must work together to find our higher minds, our truer selves. Only then can we successfully engage young people in authentic, effective and sustainable social change.


-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com

Federal Law and Student Involvement

Following are two juicy nuggets of law I've poached from this report regarding federal law and student involvement.

• 20 U.S.C. §6314(b)(2)(B)(ii) - Provides for appropriate student involvement in development of the Title I program plan in secondary schools, though with none of the specificity applicable to parents. 
• Provisions of the Perkins Act require local plan description of how students, as well as parents and others, are involved in development, implementation, and evaluation of programs assisted under the Act and how they are effectively informed about, and assisted in understanding the requirements of the Act. States are required to involve students and others in development of the state plan and for developing effective activities and procedures, including access to information needed to use them, to allow students and others to participate in State and local decisions that relate to State plan development.

Enjoy, and learn more at www.SoundOut.org!

How Should We Engage Kids of Privilege?

The Internet, television, the mall... there are so many forces that apparently distract young people in America today. How do we go about engaging young people with access, authority and what seems to be power in creating positive, powerful social change?


As I wrote about yesterday all youth need to be actively engaged in this work of positively changing society, no matter what socio-economic stratus they come from. Engulfed by the rigamarole of popular society, many young people appear to be without a care for the world. They seem disconnected and unenthusiastic about the prospect of changing the world; rather, they're concentrated on the immediate and the selfish. This is not intended to be an indictment of a generation or social class; rather, I base these observations on what many of the 1000s of adults I've worked with over the years focused on the topic of re-envisioning the roles of young people throughout society.


Before we address a problem we must name it. I believe that children and youth who are surrounded by stuff are faced with a more dire situation than we credit them for: given their inability to see the world beyond their immediate wants, they are effectively suffering a deficiency of interdependence, and are deprived the joy and authentic connectivity of community. It's as if their neural receptors for empathy were severed young, or smothered as they grew. Maybe the televisions and computers and gameboys and new clothes and pantry constantly full of food and toys and stuff simply stifles the sense of urgency, connectivity and responsibility all people are inherently born feeling. At the same time, a growing number of these young people go forward with the successes of our culture: They become student council presidents and football captains; they lead service learning projects and vote when they're 18. Others never connect in these ways, instead becoming young socialites or technology gurus, each of whom may be substituting deep connections with the temporary rush of the newest and latest friend or gadget. 


That said, there is a way to spark the connectivity of social change within the hearts and minds of these young people. In my experience it's easier with children: closer to their hearts, many harbor a desire to see beyond themselves by connecting with the lives of others around them and the well-being of the planet they live in. Starting at this age, parents can foster awareness and connectivity by actively role modeling what engagement looks like for their kids. 


As young people get older they're increasingly encouraged to disengage: the hypocrisy of spending 10 years of their schooling learning about the society around them without being allowed to actively engage with the society around them because they're segregated into age-isolated schools is not lost on youth. More than role-modeling, these youth also need active, deliberate and meaningful opportunities to connect with the world they live in in proactive and positive ways. This means not simply presenting things to do - there are plenty of things for youth to do - but actually using the incentives of whatever institution you're working in to do it. In schools teach social responsibility to students; in community centers develop youth involvement initiatives. Give classroom credit, provide stipends and public recognition, and do whatever is needed to get youth through the door. But once they're there, don't rob yourself and our world the opportunity to allow these young people to make meaning of the world they're part of.


Young people are conditioned to respond to the world around them, just as we are as adults. Dr. King once said, "I am what I am because of who we all are." That wasn't true simply for his positivity and power; it was also true for his flaws and foibles. Young people are who they are because of who we all are. Let's do something about that.

Why Should We Engage Kids of Privilege?

Why should we try to engage young people who have everything they need already? For a lot of the time I was growing up my family struggled to meet it's basic needs, and although we usually had food, water, shelter and clothes, there were days and weeks where we went without. As I'm growing older and my socio-economic status is changing though, I'm finding myself increasingly surrounded by young people who grow up without want for toys, let alone basic needs. Why do these youth need any of my energy?

In a society that relies on social inequities in order to perpetuate negative economic patterns, there is no apparent end to the oppression faced by the disenfranchised. I am under no illusion that there are grave inequities and there are apparently frivolous injustices; however, in a world with limited time and ability to affect the great numbers with a message of hope and ability, we must start anywhere and go everywhere. With that thinking I believe that the work of enriching the lives of young people of privilege gains value, as long as it's rooted in building consciousness and ability towards fighting oppression. All young people regardless of socio-economic background need to learn about the oppressive forces they perpetuate and suffer under; whether this focuses on racial, gender, age, economic, sexual orientation or other inequities, everyone needs to learn the realities that face us in this world. In learning the realities that face others and identifying the roots of the situations they find themselves in everyday, young people of privilege can become allies in the struggle against oppression, and grow in their ability to sympathize rather than pity those who are different than them. Dr. King once wrote,

"True altruism is more than the capacity to pit; it is the capacity to sympathize. Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul."

As Dr. King frequently said, and folks like Paulo Freire, bell hooks and others continue to insist, we need a soulful revolution based in love. Building the capacity of all young people to engage in this work should be our mission. The question of how to engage these youth is for a different post; here I'm only trying to answer why we should. Share your thoughts...

The Past Masquerading as the Present

The past masquerades as the present all the time when we're looking at youth involvement efforts. In communities across the country there are youth advisory councils, youth forums (pdf) and other traditional and convenient forms of youth involvement acting as if they're responsible and capable of expressing the diversity, power and ability of Youth Voice today. They simply aren't, and the past is not sufficient for the realities of today.


These kinds of inadequate responses are typically led by well-meaning adults who are uncomfortable with nontraditional, inconvenient expressions of youth voice. They want structured, familiar, controllable opportunities for young people to share what adults want to hear, when they want to hear it, where they want to hear it and why they want to hear it. This isn't completely wrong; however, it's mostly off-the-mark, no matter what the situation. These approaches to youth engagement imply that young people are incapable of expressing themselves in ways that are appropriate, focused or otherwise useful to community-building, organizational development and/or personal expression. That's completely false, no matter what the situation.


I have had many conversations with adults who say that they hand over the mic to youth and never get the responses they want to hear. "Sometimes I'll even hand over the floor and they won't say anything at all!" I think this is a straw man argument that relies on youth being uncomfortable with speaking up for themselves, which in turn generally relies on the force of adultism throttling their voices. If adults didn't constantly create and reinforce the barriers that Youth Voice faces all the time there wouldn't be an issue with young people expressing themselves. 


Writing about turn-of-the-century America, anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “In time, the experience of the children of immigrants became the experience of all American children, who now were the representatives of a new culture living in a new age.” We, as adults, are living in a new culture in which we're immigrants. For too long we've treated youth as alien; however, our society now embraces their norms - language, culture, economy and sociology - as normative behavior. The experience of young people online, including self-driven learning, entertainment-driven engagement, and youth-led culture-making, is becoming typical of the daily experience of all young people around the country, all of the time. Adults need to adapt and respond accordingly. 


Part of the adaptation that needs to make falls on the shoulders of youth involvement advocates today. We must invent, reinvent, critique, examine and reconstitute our current youth involvement activities in order to become, maintain and sustain the relevance of learning about Youth Voice for young people. Only then can we buck the reliance we've developed on the past, and begin to see into the future. Only then can we unmask the past when it's masquerading as the present.

Youth are Essential

"This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease." - Robert Kennedy

Our adultcentric society has a strange attitude towards youth as an ideal. On one hand we treat youth as a time of life in which a person is immature and saddled with the burdens of uncertainty, inability and incapacity. On the other hand we behave like youth is the only way to be, like Kennedy alluded to when he said the quote above. As adults we idolize the culture of youth, the perceived attitudes and the cultural reception of youth, with the imagery and attitudes of youth at the forefront.


This duality is dichotomous: we both scorn, belittle and repress at the same time we're uplifting, savoring and idolizing youth. This phenomenon leads to all kinds of outcomes:

• Voter registration campaigns pushing 18-year-olds into the booth at the local high school setting up tables next to lower-the-vote campaigns fighting the disenfranchisement of anyone under 18.
• Bulletin boards for soda pop featuring African American youth at the same time the prison bus is driving underneath it, packed with African American youth.
• Teachers urging students to take personal responsibility for their lives while teaching them from adult-driven curricula in which young people have no voice.

The list can go on and on. It is well past time that we address this apparent hypocrisy head-on through direct action and systems change. Organizations that serve youth need to work with youth, not for them. Parents that respect their kids need to connect with their kids, not to their kids. Systems that want powerful outcomes for young people must stop incapacitating their constituents by supporting direct services that are ineffectual from their basic design because of the absence of youth involvement. 

Dr. King wrote a sermon around the time of the Montgomery bus protests in which he said, 

"Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. Courageous men never lose the zest for living though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live."

We must lose the cowardice, timidity and incapability we have as advocates and make the case that YOUTH, both as an ideal and as a real time of life, is essential to the success of our society. Only then will we begin to find a course of success for this movement.

Youth & the Power to Change

There comes a point in life where the situations we're used to aren't sufficient for our purposes. We recognize complacency or negativity, and we decide to create change. This is the point where we find the power to change. For almost 20 years I have worked in organizations that were committed to engaging young people in finding their power to change, and for the last 10 I have actively researched what it takes to do that. Here is what I've discovered:

Wake up. Young people are not ignorant. When faced unfavorable realities in their lives, they can usually easily identify challenges and situations they need to change. Every young person has these realities to some extent, no matter their social circumstance. For instance, the student in upstate New York who is arrested by police for wearing their baseball cap in school may have been a upper middle class white young person who has all of their basic needs met; however, this violation of their right to dress according to their own will served only to diminish their personal power. Similarly, the low income youth of color in an extremely rural community who has food security issues and no regularly running water is well aware of these violations of their basic human rights. Adults need to wake up to the realities that these young people are in similar circumstances, and that collectively they both can instigate, perpetuate and sustain long term social change - given the opportunity.

Go upstream. There is no such thing as "youth problems" - we only have community problems. Young people are not isolated factors that operate on their own devoid of impact from other generations or other social factors. Rather than simply seeing the fish dieing in the lake and focusing on picking up the trash along the edges, go upstream and find the sources of the problems, whether disconnection from nature, coal mine pollution, or political laziness are to blame. Instead of blaming youth for the problems they face, look upstream and identify the root causes.

Get busy. Simply having a wake up call and looking at the problem isn't enough - we have to take action, individually and collectively. By becoming active throughout our individual lives and in the lives of the young people around us we can expose purpose, belonging and engagement in the world around us. When we do this we become conduits of transformation, and people who have personally embraced our power to change.

Follow through. Change isn't embodied by New Year's resolutions. It's not the mantra we say we're going to say to ourselves, or the policy we think we're going to get passed through the board tonight. Instead, change is the action, reaction, and sustained transformation of the world in us and around us. We have to demonstrate to children, youth, and ourselves that we're committed and engaged in our lives, in their lives, and in the communities we share. In following through we're allowing social change to become a social expectation, and preparing our world to embrace the power to change.

The critical ideas here are to wake up, go upstream, take action and follow through. From there, the power to change is yours!

Systems Change and Youth Voice

Almost two years ago I began work in Washington State's department of health. In my capacity as the agency's school health manager I was determined to infuse young people as partners throughout my work. Already familiar with the machinations of state government because of my earlier work with the state's education agency, I was fairly confident I could make some headway.

Within the first six months my longstanding co-conspirator in student involvement, Greg Williamson, and I had written youth engagement into our state's strategic plan for Coordinated School Health. It wasn't just another line about "listening to youth voice" either: instead we sought to fully engage youth as partners at the state and local levels as decision-makers, advocates and evaluators. Within a year we launched an ambitious effort to build a statewide Youth School Health Cadre comprised of students working in schools across the state focused on school health improvement. I secured additional funds from Action For Healthy Kids to support that work, and for the last several months Greg and I have been working diligently towards our goals. Working with partners we've encouraged a state advocacy organization to write youth engagement into their plans; advocated for our state's school health conference to make youth engagement the main conference theme, and; worked with allies within our agencies to support their efforts to engage youth, as well.

Engaging in systems change is complex work. Under the tutelage of Giselle Martin-Kneip and Jaimie Cloud, I learned that we should aim to influence a variety of complex components in school improvement. Curricular improvement, professional development, and educational leadership are all areas of transformation at work on the local building level. Through my work with SoundOut I discovered the levers of classroom management and formal school improvement work were important in engaging students as partners in school change. Starting my job in public health, I was determined to learn about state legislation and policy-making, and discover the effectiveness of those levers. Now I'm preparing to enter my second session as the senior policy analyst for the agency, as well as continuing the school year with our Students Taking Charge program.

With all of this work underway, I can confidently say that because of working with partners and allies like Greg, I have actually fostered systems change in our state's schools and public health field. However, I'm faced with a question of effectiveness: just because we've brought youth into the system, does that mean the system will sustain youth engagement? Does that mean youth engagement will be effective? Does that mean that the system has the capacity to continuously and successfully promote the deepened integration of youth throughout society?

These are questions I grapple with tonight.

Personally Challenging Adultism

What can I do to challenge adultism? Here are five ways to start:

1. Talk directly with all children and youth you meet. Listen to what they say, tell them what you think and feel, and focus on respect and trust-building every time you talk with them. Focus on the conversation, don't be distracted and react accordingly whenever it's appropriate.
2. Integrate young people throughout society. Seek to actively involve children and youth throughout your life and throughout your community. At home create active, meaningful and deliberate opportunities for your children; in your neighborhood treat your young neighbors as you'd treat any adult neighbors; at work lobby for and lead efforts to actively involve young people in decision-making; advocate with young people to actively integrate children and youth throughout your community.
3. Change yourself then change the world. How do you behave in adultist ways? Do you talk down to young people? Making decisions with young people people requires having young people at the table - are they there? When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with children and youth? 
4. Don't humiliate young people. If you wouldn't say it to an adult in front of adults, don't say it to children and youth in front of children and youth. There's a ridiculous assumption that we should call out young people in front of their peers in order to "teach them a lesson." While we may think we're teaching them to behave, we're actually teaching them that humiliating other people is okay. That's not okay, and as responsible adults we should not humiliate young people. Ever.
5. Teach young people that their community belongs to them. Our society is in a state of crisis, yearning for people to actually dig in their hands and do the work of social change in all kinds of areas. We have to teach young people they're directly responsible for the outcomes of their communities, both by role modeling and by taking action.

These are some early steps. What would you do next?

Modeling Engagement

I believe the single best thing adults can do to engage young people throughout society is to become engaged throughout society ourselves. Building feelings of connection, purpose and belonging should be the central goal of all our life work, whether we are youth workers, teachers or janitors. By actively engaging in the world around us, not only do we enrich our lives but the lives of young people around us.

As a parent I struggle to stay connected throughout my daughter's life. At six, I think it's important to actively demonstrate to her the ways that I belong in the world around me. But volunteering isn't the only way I do that. Every time I walk to my landlord's house to pay the rent, I take her with to show her the value of that interaction.  I like her seeing me banter with tellers in the supermarket, and being polite to people serving us in different places. The times we roam through the park we make a point of cleaning what we can, and I try to explain whatever I can to her when I help strangers or do the other things that we just do.

I believe we have to take this same approach in any situation where we interact with children and youth. We have to illustrate the connections we have with the community around us whenever we have the opportunity. Adults can engage in work in meaningful ways; we can engage in our neighborhoods and community groups in meaningful ways; we can engage in our families and with our friends in meaningful ways. My experience as a youth worker and parent have shown me this is the most effective way to teach young people about engagement. Its only from that place that we can tell the stories and share the exercises useful in rounding out the perspectives young people have about the world around them.

Developing and acknowledging opportunities for engagement throughout our lives is the first step to modeling engagement with young people. The next is more personal... stay tuned!