Adultism, or "Don't Trust Anyone UNDER 30"

A million years ago there was a slogan that incanted youth to, "Don't trust anyone over 30." Well, a lot of people have been able to dismiss that call, especially as they've gotten older and their "anti-establishment" heroes have fallen. But this post isn't about that phenomenon.

Instead, today I'm writing about the reality that a lot of the people who ascribed to the ideal of assigning trust according to age are in power today. They've got the positions that lead our society as government officials, business titans, community agency heads, and thought leaders. Some of them are overt about their discrimination against youth; some are coy. But the most apparent lesson I've discovered is the gross abuse of these individuals who are biased in the worst kind of ways: Ironically, these faux-revolutionaries who chanted against older people are now leading the battering ram against youth. Now it seems like they're yelling, "Don't Trust Anyone UNDER 30!" Someone even wrote a book by that title.

So the age discrimination battle is alive and well. We need to take a much more assertive posture in order to teach adults and young people about age discrimination, adultism, and adultocracy, as well as the fear of children and the fear of youth. We need workshop outlines, a simple and accessible guide, and a website that will successfully drive people to the growing pile of information available about age discrimination. Next steps...

• Encyclopedia article about adultism I created on Wikipedia
• Freechild Project resource page on adultism

REAL Democratic Education

There is a belief out there in the world that democratic education is a white, gleaming ideal that belongs only on pedestals high up in the sky, or faraway on another coast. This image promotes the extreme models of democratic schools like Sudbury Valley and the Village Free School, inherently dismissing the good work of teachers, students, and school leaders who are attempting to integrate democracy in every day public schools. These are the folks, these are the places, and these are the practices that I think constitute REAL democratic education.

With all their shortcomings, the founders of the United States saw public education as the cornerstone of democracy, enshrining the responsibility for schools to the people who would benefit most from them: every day citizens. With that vision, though, there was not security that the people would take that responsibility. The dilemma that I see is that The People don't understand that they are responsible for the schools they learn in. They don't understand that the future of democracy is in democratic education. EVERYTHING in public schools is everyone's responsibility. That's why I developed the Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement.

The Frameworks use comprehensive research from across the education realm to demonstrate the effectiveness of REAL democracy in schools. Through them I propose that schools re-envision the roles of learners specifically, and all adults subsequently. I draw out the need for democratic education for every person in every place of learning throughout society, identifying that every child, youth, and adult needs to learn about learning as a goal, and education as a process towards learning. The entire system has to become transparent. Then, the Frameworks show how every child, youth, and adult should be engaged throughout education in many roles, including those of student, teacher, researcher, evaluator, planner, decision-maker, and advocate.

These are the core elements of REAL democratic education that can and should be everywhere. Only then can we actualize the hope for democracy that so many of us hold in our hearts. Only then can we be the country and world we know we're capable of being. Only then can schools truly succeed, and only then are students truly successful. Anything less is undermining hope.

It's Too Different!

A lot of people in our field of work are put off by military culture. The command and control structure of the armed forces are repelling to people who treasure autonomy, to say the least. Today I'm presenting some sessions at the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, and I'm wrestling.

This program reaches 1000s of youth nationwide who dropout of school and apparently don't have future plans. These are generally young men and women between 16 and 18 who don't have rapsheets, aren't drug-involved, and have left school before graduating. Many youth programs are set up for these youth by community-based nonprofits and churches; however, none are as well funded or culturally driven as ChalleNGe. 200,000 youth have participated in the last 20 years; 50% of them earn their diplomas.

The culture of this space is rarified in positive youth development programs, which is one core value of ChalleNGe. Thoroughly quasi-militaristic, there's a high premium on machismo and strength. Young people participate in a regimented program for several months, and respond to a command structure echoing the military.

What does this mean for youth engagement? With the roles of self-determination and full partnership factoring so heavily in youth engagement, is the work of ChalleNGe inherently antithetical to developing the emotional bonds necessary for engagement? My older brother felt an emotional bond towards the Marines after he dropped out of high school and joined. He was surely engaged.

Right now I'm wondering whether there's a cultural norm at work here. Raised with the expectation that military culture can limit negative behaviors and liberate ones self from self-destructive actions, many youth don't see that they can be critical to their communities. This program imposes that upon it's participants, and for that I respect it.

However, when Dr King called for an army of nonviolent soldiers he didn't have this in mind. Instead, he envisioned highly-disciplined, highly-capable young people committed not to themselves but to the communities they belong to and the families they come from. This is what we should each arrive for in our work, abs nothing less.

I'm going to let the ChalleNGe program inspire me to engage more youth more effectively at this point in their lives, so as to provide a clear alternative to quasi-military activities, and get closer to that nonviolent army.




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

Social Stigmas

I am not satisfied with simply dismissing adultism as "social stigma," nor do I believe that anytime a young person is discriminated against it is inherently adultism. Remember that I define adultism as the addiction our society has to the ideas, actions, and words of adults.

Sitting in another airport somewhere in America, I just watched an instance involving several younger people being blatantly ignored then turned away by a gate worker, for no apparent reason. In the past I might've been tempted to label this adultism and turn away from it; today I know differently. I could break this down along from many angles, including thoughts along the lines of privilege and climate.

Social class driven cultural norms, including clothing, speech, and manuerisms informed the communication between these parties. Perceptions of bias and discrimination are real for those experiencing them; however, prejudice needs to be named correctly in order to be addressed effectively.

Naming oppressions and social stigmas effectively are the keys to successfully changing society. Let's use them to open the door to let everyone in.


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

In Defense of Public Schools

I'm a product of public schools, and my daughter is attending them, too. The only child of four to graduate on-time, my schooling wasn't nearly adequate. The mostly white teachers in my high school were overworked, under-appreciated, and stressed from working in a low- and middle-class magnet school in the African American neighborhood I grew up in in the Midwest. My daughter attends a public school, though remarkably different from anything I ever attended.

It's a sad day when our society has effectively stigmatizes the very institutions we need to rely on in order to have a successful society. The fact is that the founding fathers intended for public schools to be the places where our kids grew into capable, complete citizens. I believe in that vision, expanded for everyone to have free and full access to learn, and to incubate the desire and capacity to learn for life. We have to have public schools, and without them, hope for our democracy is limited, at best.

Private schools are inherently limited in their ability to affect the greater society in which they operate. Those who have the ability to access their services (read: money) are generally responsible for how things have always gone in our society - that much is true. However, as conscientious parents we have to make a deliberate and intentional choice as to whether we are going to contribute to the continued skewering of the public good by subjecting our kids to the exclusivism, classism, and segregation inherent in all private schools. And I understand that in some situations that is apparently the only way to go. I get that! But I also get that every time a caring, concerned, conscious parent retracts from engaging their kids in the public school system, we loose an ally for social justice, student engagement, and equality in public education.

I would pose that rather than choosing not to subject our children to the inadequacies of public schools, we choose to actively engage in them starting right now. As members of a democratic society with the levers of democracy in our hands, we ALL have the opportunity and desire to learn, so do this: learn about the school system, learn about how to change public schools, and then do the opposite of putting your kids in private schools - actively, meaningfully, and fully engage yourself and your kids in promoting the health and well-being of democracy by getting parents, students, and other communities to work changing your local public schools. We have to take responsibility for schools, and there are examples to aspire to and follow. 

Let's not shirk our responsibility any further. These public schools are one of the greatest hopes we have of ever realizing the full possibility of our democracy. 

All Relationships Are a Mirror

So many different attitudes are projected onto young people, and always have been, positively and negatively. Speaking about young people during the classical era he lived in, Greek philosopher Socrates supposedly said,

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Through my research on the sociology of youth I have found quotes and editorials from the 1600s lamenting lost youth, and that attitude generally continued onwards through the next century. Every generation seems to have been the downfall of society, and the rue of preceding generations. Young people have also represented hope, and have been the subject of cheery optimism, too. Their voices are romanticized and their culture is idealized, with entire industries built just to help adults acquire the seemingly unattainable glory of youth.

But all relationships are a mirror. What we see in other people is what is in ourselves, for better or worse. Youth are mirrors of adults, whether we like them or despise them. Adults tend to want to be around young people who have things about them we like but want more of in ourselves. We dislike young people - intensely - when we find traits in them that we dislike in ourselves.

A challenging activity for any adult is to spend time writing the qualities of young people they know who they actually like and enjoy being around. Then make a separate list of things about young people they don't like. From that point it's important to notice that that ambiguity - where all of those likes and dislikes are in others - are in ourselves, too. Then we can be more compassionate with the young people we're around, because we can see that all relationships are a mirror, and that in that mirror comes hope.

10 Ways Adults Can Show They Care About Student Voice

Just telling students you care about student voice isn't the way to engage students in schools. As a teacher, principal, counselor, or other adult in schools, you set the tone and create the climate for student voice to be an effective tool in the school improvement arsenal. Check out the following 10 Ways Adults Can Show They Care About Student Voice.

1. Commit and follow through with the idea that student voice should be as student-driven as possible.
2. Fun and laughter are requirements for successfully engaging student voice.
3. Create awareness around different problems throughout the education system and seek to engage your students as active partners who can help solve these problems.
4. Provide examples of ways that students have made a difference. See www.soundout.org, www.youthnoise.com, www.freechild.org, and www.takingitglobal.org for examples.
5. Connect individually with your students about their thoughts about your class, school, or program as frequently as possible and demonstrate that you actually care about their specific thoughts and feelings about school. 
6. Encourage students and help them to find opportunities to engage in school that use their strengths, talents, interests or skills. Create those opportunities as often as you can.
7. Make sure your students are using their friendship networks to find out what their friends think about schools.
8. Promote student voice in happy, friendly and accessible ways when appropriate. When necessary, confront adults who are resistant, and challenge apathy or disregard for student voice.
9. Promote the benefits of student voice to students – both personal benefits and the potential final results.
10. Provide opportunities for students to socialize and just talk about student voice.

This isn't a deep prescription, but it does provide a place to start. Check out www.soundout.org for more useful info about student voice in schools!

Creating a Supportive Environment for Youth Service

Creating a safe and supportive environment is essential for engaging students in a community service program, organization, or throughout a community. The environment includes everything around youth, including the culture, structures, and climate of the organizations they volunteer in and learn from. The vast majority of programs, organizations or communities that seek to engage youth as volunteers are adult-driven, which makes it vital for adults to work with youth to create these environments, rather than assume that they must do all the work.

·        Climate is the way people behave, their attitudes and feelings within a program, organization or throughout a community.

·        Structure includes the responsibilities, systems, authority and relations that allow a program, organization or community to perform its functions.

·        Culture includes the attitudes, values, beliefs, and typical patterns of relationships, behavior, and performance that characterize the program, organization, or community.

The following are essential elements in creating a safe and supportive environment for youth community service.

Climate 

• There is a general sentiment among the majority of adults and youth that engaging youth is a key to success. 
• Adults in believe that engaging youth in a variety of roles is important and possible. 
• Youth and adults acknowledge their mutual investment, dedication, and benefit, and it is made visible in relationships, practices, policies, and organizational culture. 
• Adults do not talk about youth in the third person or otherwise act as if youth are not present, when in fact they are. 
• Student volunteerism is validated and authorized through adults' regular acknowledgement of their ability to improve programs, organizations and schools. 

Structure 

• The voices, strengths, talents, actions and achievements of youth are continuously focused on in our program, organization or community, and are infused throughout all components of all activities. 
• Important activities focused on youth are done with youth, including research, planning, teaching, evaluation, decision-making and advocacy. 
• Before any activities in which they're engaged youth have opportunities to learn about the issues, agendas, politics and processes they are going to participate in. 
• Programs and organizations have made youth part of plans, activities and evaluations, and young people have contributed throughout the process. 
• Student volunteers incorporated into ongoing, sustainable activities throughout the group, organization or community. 
• Student volunteers are encouraged and supported to invite other young people or adult allies to support them. 
• The voices of youth of all ages are engaged throughout the program, organization or community. 

Culture 

• Youth feel comfortable asking for clarification of acronyms, definitions, concepts, or asking critical questions about assumptions, activities and other components. 
• Youth are never lectured about their behavior, attitudes, input or other perceptions adults may have of them. Instead, adults and youth are treated as equal partners, each with valuable contributions to make to the program, organization or community. 
• Issues addressed by student volunteers are not limited to so-called "youth issues"; instead, youth are seen and treated as members of the entire community. "Their" issues are the community's issues, and the communities issues are theirs. 

Let me know what you think! And for more information about support environments see the Freechild Project Youth Voice Toolkit at http://www.freechild.org/YouthVoice.

Youth Volunteerism Links

Want to learn more about what children and youth are doing to make a different in the world around them? Check out the following websites!  Every program here is part of a broad international movement promoting youth volunteering, action, and empowerment.  

Child Friendly Cities (CFC) – A UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre initiative that focuses on youth involvement throughout communities. The website is a tool for exchanging information, sharing data and networking among communities around the world. Users can access information about the activities, objectives and methodologies of CFC projects, links with CFC partners and examples.  www.childfriendlycities.org

The Freechild Project – Seeks to connect young people to social change efforts around the world. Freechild highlights thousands of organizations, publications, websites, and resources from hundreds of topic areas focused on youth involvement. www.freechild.org

McCreary Center – Their youth participation and youth action initiatives provide a variety of resources. Located in McCreary, British Columbia, the Center features unique tools and more.  www.mcs.bc.ca/ya_base.htm

SoundOut – Promotes student voice in schools through an online portal that provides examples, research, publications, discussion forums, and organizations to students, educators, and others. www.soundout.org

TakingITGlobal – An online community made of more than 100,000 young people around the world. These youth collaborate on projects, express themselves, and participate in vibrant discussions about technology, involvement, and democracy online. www.takingitglobal.org

Teens as Community Builders – Highlights accomplishments of young people across the United States by telling stories of youth who are doing positive things to improve their communities. www.pps.org/tcb

Voices of Youth – A UNICEF project that encourages young people around the world to become positively involved in their communities. www.unicef.org/voy

What Kids Can Do – Features stories from students across the United States who are leading community and school change projects. www.whatkidscando.org

Youth Voice and Engagement – This comprehensive web portal is a collaboration of several partnerships and agencies in New York State, including the NYS Partnership for Children, the ACT for Youth Upstate Center of Excellence (UCE), and the ACT Downstate Center for Excellence. There are hundreds of publications, programs and other tools for Youth Voice practitioners. www.youthengagementandvoice.org

Find more links about youth volunteerism at www.freechild.org

New Roles for Youth Volunteers

It’s not just about showing up for the project! With the development of new technology, new learning experiences, and different avenues for participation throughout our communities, young people have assumed, been assigned, and have co-created new roles for youth volunteers. Youth volunteers today have so many others ways they can contribute to our communities. Check out some of these exciting new roles!

Youth as Facilitators – Knowledge comes from study, experience, and reflection. Engaging young people as teachers helps reinforce their commitment to learning and the subject they are teaching; it also engages both young and older learners in exciting ways. 

Youth as Researchers – Identifying issues, surveying interests, analyzing findings, and developing projects in response are all powerful avenues for youth volunteers. 

Youth as Planners – Planning includes program design, event planning, curriculum development, and hiring staff. Youth planning activities can lend validity, creativity, and applicability to abstract concepts and broad outcomes. 

Youth as Organizers – Community organizing happens when leaders bring together everyone in a community in a role that fosters social change. Youth community organizers focus on issues that affect themselves and their communities; they rally their peers, families, and community members for action. 

Youth as Decision-Makers – Making rules in classrooms is not the only way to engage young people in decision-making. Committees, board membership, and other forms of representation and leadership reinforce the significance of youth volunteers throughout communities. 

Youth as Advocates – When young people stand for their beliefs and understand the impact of their voices, they can represent their families and communities with pride, courage, and ability. 

Youth as Evaluators – Assessing and evaluating the effects of programs, classes, activities, and projects can promote youth volunteerism in powerful ways. Young people can learn that their opinions are important, and their experiences are valid indicators of success. 

Youth as Specialists – Envisioning roles for youth to teach youth is relatively easy; seeing new roles for youth to teach adults is more challenging. Youth specialists bring expert knowledge about particular subjects to programs and organizations, enriching everyone’s ability to be more effective. 

Want to learn more about new roles for youth volunteers? Check out the Freechild Project Youth Voice Toolkit at www.freechild.org/YouthVoice/roles.htm.

Connecting Learning and Service

Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities. You can use your school's current community service requirement to connect service with learning! If your school doesn't have a requirement, you can connect service and learning in your own classroom. Here are some examples:

Elementary children in Florida studied the consequences of natural disasters. The class designed a kit for families to use to collect their important papers in case of evacuation with a checklist, tips about rescuing pets, and other advice to make a difficult situation easier, which students distributed to community members.

Middle school students in Pennsylvania learned about the health consequences of poor nutrition and lack of exercise, and then brought their learning to life by conducting health fairs, creating a healthy cookbook, and opening a fresh fruit and vegetable stand for the school and community.

Girl Scouts in West Virginia investigated the biological complexity and diversity of wetlands. Learning of the need to eliminate invasive species the scouts decided to monitor streams, presented their findings to their Town Council to raise awareness of the issues concerning local wetlands.

Community service is volunteer action taken to meet the needs of others and better the community as a whole. Service-learning is integrated into and enhances the academic curriculum of students engaged in service, or the educational components of the community service program in which the participants are enrolled. The most important feature of effective service-learning programs is that both learning and service are emphasized.

You can learn more about service learning from many great resources at www.servicelearning.org.

Moving Further By Creating Climates for Engagement

"Climate" is the emotional, social, and environmental setting within a specific place, i.e. a neighborhood, a school, an organization, or even a home.

I'm in Chicago this morning for the second of three days with Action for Healthy Kids. We're in a space called Catalyst Ranch, and it is hands down The Most Creative Space I've Ever Worked In (second place goes to the Campaign Consultation offices in Baltimore!). The environmental climate here is spectacular, with the walls and rooms covered by hipster garage sale stuff. This space almost demands enthusiasm. But the climate is more than a room.

The emotional climate of a space informs how deep folks are willing to engage within that space. The social climate allows and encourages people to see how and where and why they fit within a space. The environments we operate in set the initial tone and reinforce the climate that is being established. Creating intentional climates for engagement requires intentional efforts to move on each of these areas, and more.

Often when people think about engaging young people, they think about the physical climate of engagement - colorful walls or funky music or pizza on the table are enough from that perspective. Sometimes people think about the social climate and whether the activities are fun enough or the outcomes are powerful enough. Every once in a while people think about the emotional climate. But rarely do we string together those different elements in order to ensure the overarching efficacy of the climate in a space.

Successfully engaging anybody requires that the climate be considered in a deliberate and intentional way. And by success I'm talking about whether an activity is effective and if it can be sustained over time. We must create climates for engagement - not just programs, not just agendas, and not just outcomes. Then we can move further.

Is Youth Voice a Purpose or Function?

After training 1000s of people around the country for several years on the topic of Youth Voice it strikes me there were several tensions in the concept of "engaging youth voice." I have sought to address some of them:

• The now-routine segregation of youth and adults perpetuated by most schools and youth-serving nonprofits;
• The demonization/infantalization dicotomy promoted by youth-focused consumerism and promoted by mainstream media;
• The inherent dependence of the nonprofit industry on portraying young people as "broken,"

And so forth. However, long after one of my mentors tried teaching me about it, today I came to understand another incidious problem: when individuals, programs, and entire organizations confuse the purpose and function of Youth Voice.

Seeing "engaging youth voice" as the sole purpose of a program is an inherently problematic perspective because this goal focuses on the means not the ends - the function, not the purpose. Engaging youth voice is an way to achieve many purposes, many of which I'm not promoting. Engaging youth voice can be a great way to promote consumerism - it's already used in countless ad campaigns for products that "make" youth want to buy them for the sake of buying them; the ads made them feel special, hopeful, or told them that an otherwise unknown desire could be satiated by owning a particular thing. Engaging youth voice can be a great way to recruit young people into the military; it can be an effective way to lure students to complete school; and it can be a convenient vehicle for imposing compliance and authoritarianism - yep, that's right - youth voice can be a way to promote control. At the same time youth voice can be a vehicle for promoting deeper learning, more effective governance, and more successful community belonging. All those are ends, or purposes, for engaging youth voice.

But engaging youth voice for the sake of engaging youth voice is a myopic perspective, at best. At worst, it promotes gross negligence and narcissism. Young people need to understand that their words and actions take meaning in the larger world beyond them, and with that in mind they need to assume the responsibilities and obligations inherent in caring for that world. When we focus on "getting the youth on board" without naming the reason why we're doing that, we inherently subject young people to the ambiguity of social order and the prevailing order of our society.

Let's acknowledge that youth engagement is a means to an end, and not the purpose in and of itself. Only then can we move forward beyond this place.

Waiting, or Working?

I'm flying right now and thinking about my roots in youth engagement. One of those roots grew about 20 years ago when I was a teenager living in Omaha, Nebraska. The year I was 15 I was invited to go to Chicago for an anti-youth violence conference. It was my first conference, my first airplane ride, and my first youth action training.

My neighborhood was torn up my youth violence, with drive-bys and getting jumped as daily staples of our social reality. The news slammed us, too, constantly portraying our blocks as terrible and terrifying. If I'd known differently I might've agreed; but I didn't- this was my home and I was tired of the parents of my school friends who wuldn't let their kids come to my house because it was in "that" neighborhood.

I live far away from that neighborhood now- but my memories are fresh in my imagination. I remember my little sister's friend Fish who was as powerful a leader as any I've ever met even though his skills were mostly applied in dealing illicit narcotics. There were my best friends Joe and Tracy who dropped out of Scouts as soon as they realized it wasn't cool - even though they were as good, if not better than me, and should've got Eagle Scout, too. The stories in my family, among our friends, and throughout that neighborhood stay here, too. They keep me company in long state government meetings, during marathon writing sessions, and on another cross-country flight, like right now.

I can't sit waiting, hoping that some other reality will come along and steal my imagination to make me it's own. Instead, I continue to work, giving room for my memories to meet my present, and allowing my past to inform my future. How about you- are you waiting, or working?


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

Reaching Further with Youth Engagement

Sometimes inspiration is all that's needed. Last night I facilitated a group of 20 youth and 6 adults at a 2.5 hour youth forum in rural Pierce County, Washington. Their community is a mobile home park founded 25 years ago as a retirement community that has seen evolved into a neighborhood filled with a variety of residents, bringing along with them all the complexities that economic diversity does: nice houses clashing with poorly-upkept homes; drug addicts stealing from everyone, and; people who use the neighborhood food bank not looking good for people who just bought a new house in their area.

The young people faced many of the same situations young people everywhere face, including a lack of recreational activities, no safe routes to school or parks or through their neighborhood, and violence at home and among friends. They also shared a lot about drug use. Adults who were in the room talked about many of the same issues, sharing challenging situations and relating to many of the youth participants' experiences.

But there were sticky points throughout the evening. Many youth were suspected of being high, and others were scowled at for goofing around during the activities. Looks of disapproval were handed out freely among youth, and some were shared from adults to youth. Some youth scowled at the adults. These are incidents that I am very familiar with.

It will come as no surprise to people who know me that when I was a teen I was a little too rambunctious and a little too inaccessible to some adults. I frequently goofed off in class, and sometimes made fun of the minister during church services. I skipped a lot of school and didn't really apply myself in a lot of classes. The times I got in fights or did other bad things were balanced by my volunteer activities in a strange dichotomy, which I still live today in my own ways. But I wasn't widely applauded for doing good things, and that wasn't why I did them. Instead I did them because it felt right, or I did them because it was a thing to do. Those are the reasons why a lot of young people were there last night.

Rather than see these youth as broken or in need of services, these are the precise young people who need to be seen as resources. It's not because they're easy to work with or particularly amicable towards adults; its because they care deep within themselves. That caring lays the foundation for a radical commitment towards their community and towards the world around them.

With that as a foundation I believe that any neighborhood can move young people from passive residents towards becoming active partners in community building. This is the ground-floor of my mission of re-envisioning the roles of young people throughout society: actively engaging every young person as a full member of anything, be it a community improvement group, school, a summer program for kids, or at the city hall. In the last few months I've watched this work underway in Manchester, Connecticut; Arlington, Virginia; and now in rural Pierce County, Washington. There are great strides underway with youth engagement, and we can continue reaching further. Let me know what you're up to!

When Communities Can't Support Youth Engagement

Community-wide depression sucks. Growing up during my teens in a low-income neighborhood in the Midwest I experienced this reality constantly. Joblessness, empty houses, lack of city services, poor police response, and other resource deprivations were responded to by the people in our neighborhood with rampant drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, youth and adult gangs, and a lot of other sucky situations. Nonprofits and churches tried (and keep trying) to answer the problems in the neighborhood by putting out new programs and attempting different approaches... Not for naught, but not entirely successful, either.

I was an excited youth, if only because I felt the energy and excitement that came from doing things for other people. That meant volunteering at the local elementary school as Santa and mowing Mrs. Hickerson's lawn; sleeping in Habitat for Humanity houses as they were built to protect them from vandalism, and unloading the food bank truck when it came in. My parents invited me along to things at first, and as I got older I made myself more available. But the neighborhood's inability to support my active engagement became startlingly clear the year when I was 17. That year I launched my Eagle Scout project, forming a youth council at the big old Methodist church on the corner that hosted a lot of youth activities. I instinctively knew that all these different activities needed a gathering point to connect and collaborate, and using a youth council we tried. I spent a year calling monthly meetings and encouraging people to continue working together. As soon as I was done and went away to work for the summer, then off to college, the youth council stopped meeting. A lot of other activities folded, too, although I'm not sure they had anything to do with my absence.

The point is that my community was unable to support my engagement and the engagement of others when I was young. Adults were (appropriately) preoccupied with many other issues, including getting food into hungry mouths and children out of unsafe houses. This meant that something had to go, and in this case it was the youth council.

Tonight I'm going to facilitate a youth forum in a neighborhood that resonates a lot with one I lived in when I was younger and my family was in more dire circumstances. I'm nervous about getting the youth there all excited about changing the world and then sending them forth... with no ability from the depressed, under-resourced community they live in to actually support their active engagement. What to do, what to do?

As my frequent co-conspirator Greg Williamson says, "Start anywhere and go everywhere." That's what I'll do - what about you?