Focus On Great

Today I had a great conversation with Cindy Van Arnam, the wonderful leader behind Focus On Great. For the last while Cindy has been talking with youth across central British Columbia focused on how they can "be great" and do great things throughout society. I really enjoyed talking with Cindy, and heard the world shrink up when we discussed our hometowns, which are close to each other in Alberta.

While I was talking with Cindy I remembered the essential nature of self-skills inventories when we're sharing our abilities with our communities. Whether we're trying to promote positive messages to youth, consult national nonprofit organizations, or build a community network that can change the world, it's important to be fully aware of what we can do individually, and to remember that those abilities are what makes us essential to changing the world.

Three Tips for Youth Work Job Seekers

A few weeks ago I started offering free youth worker job coaching for people who have lost their jobs or are searching for jobs working with young people. Since I began I have talked with 20 people from across the US and Canada. 

Here are a few tips I've pulled together that keep emerging in those conversations:

Youth Equality: A Utopian Story

‎"Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance." - Eduardo Galeano

That year my daughter entered middle school was the end of the revolutionary phase. For years we'd struggled and taught, advocated and rallied. There had been advances and setbacks, until one day the levees broke. Suddenly, children and youth flooded the streets of our society's consciousness. Almost without warning, they were everywhere throughout the city, including the government buildings downtown, the businesses in the strip malls, and the culture at night.

It was like they knew no limits aside from those we'd carefully negotiated; culture, identity, spirituality, and perception seemed like shared events while they were dancing in troupes, painting incredible murals, and reciting poems in every corner.

We had no idea how broad and how deep the revolution would affect our society.

Within just a few weeks there were billboards for youth candidates posted along the interstates, and within a few months citizen-driven green initiatives were transforming those interstates into multi-use travel corridors for bicycles, high-speed rail, and alternative vehicles like Segways. Technology became ubiquitous after young people did, with fully integrated usages throughout schools, homes, and public spaces; McDonald's and shopping malls rapidly emptied out as the wisdom of young people emerged in a collective tour de force against consumerism and for community-building. Almost immediately young minds and hands were freed to resolve the centuries-old crises of poverty and racism, and with their elasticity apparent, "poor" neighborhoods were transformed into bastions of hope as the young people who lived in them were immediately engaged, employed, and empowered to take charge.

Replacing hatred with hope, people of all ages lined up to serve through AmeriCorps, and lines formed outside every Big Brothers/Big Sisters agency in the country. Every institution that served kids was suddenly flooded with donations and volunteers, all because the immediately reality of young people became fully apparent to every single person in the country.

For my daughter, well, none of this passed by her unnoticed. Her blog quickly announced every development, and her web series openly critiqued, celebrated, and challenged all the developments she'd helped bring about. As she wrote, "My determination and hope were only a drop of water in the sea of this new reality. I only want what is best for everyone, including myself."

Utopia realized, I began to imagine a new reality further beyond this one.

Finding Myself

This retreat weekend has been a train-the-trainer event for a program called Generation WakingUp. The program is focused on helping young people identify their investment in changing the world, and providing them with tools to take immediate action. The training is very wholistic and affords great motivation for participants.

Over the course of the last six months I've had the good fortune to invest a great deal of time to finding myself. In the busyness and energy of the last decade, I found my concept of who I am drifting from my best knowledge of who I am. Circumstance and influence drove me to focus on money-making, and unaddressed childhood experiences both imposed themselves loudly in my days. I veered and swerved there for a while, but with good encouragement from the universe I found amazing avenues for embracing my challenges and today I'm finding it easier to simply be me.

This weekend has allowed me the expensive space to simply be: To be me, to be here, and to be now. I'm learning, albeit slowly, that Adam's a great guy in all his myriad ways. That's my reflection from this morning.


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

Sharing This Space

Today is the third and last day of the Generation WakingUp gathering in Seattle. I've enjoyed all of it, for the first time in my adult life participating- not facilitating- in something with my unabashedly full self. It really is a beautiful day.

One of the components of meaningful youth involvement I've routinely neglected in my work has been the spaces, environments, and climates we need to cultivate in order to successfully engage young people. Those spaces vary according to who is in the room, what the activities are, and what the intended outcomes are going to be.




It's been exciting for me here at Generation WakingUp to feel the successful revealing of the climate we're engaged in as co-learners. All of the markers of a good Pacific Northwest gathering are here, including the music, banners, and African drums. But environment goes beyond "stuff": through careful design and substantial nurturing, the training design allows participants to enter themselves into the fray, effectively drawing out very personal contributions to the whole, engendering that sense of community among participants in a wonderful way.

I stayed here for an hour last night in a rather inspired beatbox battle with another guy named Adam. It was fun, it was freeing, and for what feels like the first time in a long time, I am me, fully and wholly. I want to share this space with you!


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

Examined Assumptions

There's a wide world of youth engagement out here! For more than two decades I have been involved in activism led by and with youth, first in my local neighborhood, then across my city, then across the United States, and now around the world. I have been privileged to see, feel, and experience a range of actions, issues, ideas, and outcomes that many people have never had the chance to see.

Out of this I have developed a whole array of assumptions about young people, adults, society, and social change. Today, in the middle of day 2 of the Generation WakingUp gathering here in Seattle, we examined our unexamined assumptions. I want to share with you some of the assumptions I have nurtured, examined, critiqued, and reformed through my work in this field.

1. Society's conceptions of young people must evolve. We have created a condition where young people don't know when childhood ends and youth begins, when youth ends and adulthood begins. We have created generations of young people who are disengaged from their personal, civic, and global responsibilities. This must change from the very beginnings of life, through radical shifts in the ways we conceive of childhood. We believe young people must be treated as equal partners throughout society.
2. We do not have "youth problems" - we have community problems. Our communities have community problems that have to be addressed that way. There is a popular trend in our society to blame young people for their own problems, when in reality we share those challenges with them. We must act together in community to create positive, powerful, and sustainable change. We believe it takes a child to raise a village - not vice versa.
3. All youth are not the same. The word youth is used to capture the experiences of young people anywhere between the ages of five to twenty-five. This must stop. The experience of an African American 11-year-old woman in the suburbs is not going to be the same as the Latino teen in the rural Midwest. Many adults seek to treat all youth as if they are the same, needing the same supports, structures, and experiences to inform their common understanding of their lives. THEY DON'T. Society has different demands on different youth, and depending on what we honestly expect of youth, we should support their individual needs. We believe that diversity is a value, and that we must encourage and support all young people as individual members of their larger communities.
4. Young people should be connected to something larger than themselves. Where young people are fighting for rights, many have fought before. When young people are taking more responsibility, they are taking it from someone else. Youth must learn to advocate for people and places other than themselves. This way our communities can educate against ignorance, learn from elders, and form global movements for unity. We believe that unity is at the heart of community, and that youth are an integral part of a larger whole.
5. Working with young people should not be "feel good" work. Don't work with young people because it "feels good" to you. Do it because it is urgent. Segregation is splitting our communities apart, democracy is losing its vitality, the planet we live on is dieing. Adults must realize that our work must be more than a band-aid - we can be heal. Without your work, words, beliefs, and ideals our world is going to come undone. We believe that by denying the power of young people, our society is going to bring about its own demise.
6. We must look at our work in a critical light and encourage others too, also. All people must critically reflect on their experience as youth, as adults, as teachers, as students, in all of their capacities, in order to have cause socially just, vital worldwide transformation. Anyone aspiring to educate, serve, train, coordinate or activate young people must be able to critically reflect and grow from their past experiences. We must grow from our personal and organizational limitations in order to truly transform our world, and this is how. We believe that we make the road by walking, and that it is each person's responsibility to continue the job of road-building.

While you may share one or all of these assumptions with me, they are mine alone right now. I arrived at them after years of reflection, nurtured them through years of action and further reflection, and re-envisioned them through more time spent in the dreams.

Thank you to Generation WakingUp for this reminded that I come from somewhere within, and I continue from that place, and many others.

It's the Arrival

It's the start of Day 2 of the Generation WakingUp event in Seattle, and the sun is pouring into this yoga loft in Lake Union. I woke early and excited, and sitting here I know why. Already this morning when I was texting with my friend and ally Adrienne I came across the idea of doing an intro youth activist training in Olympia.

Inside these special bubbles of location and occupation I think that we take activist energy for granted sometimes. Recently I've forgotten that it takes that initial spark, that firestarting that I used to burn for. This event reminds me that is integral as I watch a legion of young activists coming into their own understandings of what this work can mean in their own lives. A difference in my pedagogy is that my work is centered on social action, and taking initiative to change the world as well as ourselves.

At the end of the day I believe that what matters is that folks, young and old, arrive at their own will in their own paces. Generation WakingUp is reminding me of that.


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

Possibilities and Hope

This is my second liveblog from the Generation WakingUp gathering in Seattle. At the close of the first day's session, I had the opportunity to remember why I enjoy working with children and youth so much: possibilities and hope.

The day was filled with wonderful activities that were excited, focused, and energetic. Joined by facilitators from Power of Hope, the event brought in more than 40 young people and adult allies from throughout Seattle, across the Northwest, and a few other places. The facilitators, led quietly by Joshua Gorman, did a great job of leading the diverse group of participants and maintaining a space that was driven towards connection and interaction. I was impressed by the smooth facilitation, clearly the product of a well-versed team.

The space that was created was centered on social change and spirituality, the kind of versed balance brought through the informed perspective of very attuned people. Alas, it was informed by the Awakening the Dreamer program of the Pachamama Alliance. The good intention of Awakening the Dreamer, "an interactive transformational workshop that inspires participants to play a role in creating a new future: an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet", is echoed throughout the Generation WakingUp event so far, except with a more dynamic presentation. Its exciting to me. That it focuses on creating new stories and storytelling only takes it all to another level.

The entire evening ended with a large group reflection on the attributes of young people today. Remember that part of the excitement here for me is that I get to participate, rather than facilitate. After a few people spoke, I shared an observation I heard last month in Miami, which is that youth today are a generation of hope. Raised with "hope" as a slogan during the last presidential campaign, young people today have internalized the breadth of the internet and the demands of service learning they were exposed to in high school. Rather than being faced with the dichotomous headspinning of the media in the 1990s as they alternately labeled youth slackers and superpredetators: with we weren't ambitious enough, or too ambitious!

Alas, I raised the word "hope" as an attribute of young people today, and quickly that words resonated through the room. I then connected it to the word "possibilities", which together represent my broadest expectation and design for youth today: That they maintain hope in and for the radical possibilities ahead of us.

I know there's more ahead, and luckily, I know the generation present has the where with all to take us to that space.

Connections With Soul

For a long time I've skirted the topic of soul-full youth engagement work. Today I'm liveblogging from Generation WakingUp, a soul-oriented youth action training program that's operating internationally, and this weekend in Seattle. I connected with Generation WakingUp through Joshua Gorman, who has connected with me a few times over the years as he participated in developing this program. It's my honor to be here with him and the crew putting this together.

I've skirted this area because for a long time- more than a decade- I was resistant to making the connection inherent between soul and social change. However, being a student of Kingian philosophy and Gandhian practice, I'm well aware of the spiritual roots of all successful social change leaders throughout time. In the last several months I've become increasingly attuned to the soulside of this work, which today I openly acknowledge is my soulwork.

I'm excited, and a little nervous, for this weekend, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you through the blog. I'm dedicating this weekend as a gift to myself as I continue my journey into myself for the first time. I also carry the deep impact of the people who've spiritually influenced me over the years, including Helen, Edu, Jamie, Jim, and more recently, Heather, Victoria, Abby, Tanya, and Teddy. Hannah is always at the middle of my heart. My mom, dad, and sisters stay with me, too.

Stay tuned for more!


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

School Connectedness and Meaningful Student Involvement

I was recently reminded of a conversation that's been raging in schools for a decade regarding connectedness. For a long the time the relationship between students feeling connected to their learning experiences and their success in schools was simply assumed to be obvious. However, with the research wars of the 2000s, this simple assumption had to be quantified, and in turn, prescribed and programmatized. In 2007 my work was the beneficiary of some of these efforts when the US Department of Education used my work on Meaningful Student Involvement as the basis for a publication called School Connectedness and Meaningful Student Participation. It was nice to see my concepts validated that way.

However, today when I went to ed.gov to find the citation the changing landscape of the Department was shown to me, as all of the resources ED had regarding safe and supportive learning environments were taken offline, and the links to that topic were sent to SAMSHA. Connectedness was defined by ED as "the belief by students that adults in the school care about their learning and about them as individuals." While I could argue the ill-placed basis of this definition, I think it's more important to stay on point: Connectedness needs to be at the core of the academic experience for all students.

My Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement provide a clear avenue for schools to create a clear pathway towards connectedness for all students by re-envisioning the roles of all students throughout the education system. There is no greater calling for schools today.

Summary of Meaningful Student Involvement

Recently I was asked to write a new summary of Meaningful Student Involvement, and the majority of it wasn't used. Here is the original text, for an international publication that veers towards academic.

Meaningful Student Involvement, or MSI, is a model for school improvement that strengthens the commitment of students to education, community and democracy. MSI re-envisions the roles of students in equitable partnerships with adults throughout the learning environment. It promotes student engagement by securing roles for students in every facet of the educational system and recognizes the unique knowledge, experience and perspective of each individual student.

As a research-driven model reflecting international practice, MSI effectively reveals the evolving capacities of children and youth in the environments where they spend a large majority of their days: schools. It centers on developing constructivist-learning opportunities for students to participate in roles as education researchers, school planners, teachers, learning evaluators, systemic decision-makers, and advocates in schools, for schools. Adults in schools, including teachers, administrators, and support staff, as well as parents, are central to Meaningful Student Involvement, as well. By building partnerships for better curriculum, classroom management, and formal school improvement, MSI recognizes the necessity of engaging all adults within the learning environment as partners to students. Focused professional development for staff and learning opportunities integrated throughout the school day for students allow the whole school to change.

By reinforcing critical thinking, active problem solving, civic participation, and an appreciation for diverse perspectives, MSI allows students to apply essential “soft skills” learning to real world issues that affect them every day. It represents a shift away from the perspective of students as passive recipients of adult-driven schools by positioning every young person in every learning environment as a learner, teacher, and leader. Even more so, MSI gives schools concrete, customized tools to do this. Meaningful Student Involvement is not just an idea whose time has come– it is a new reality that schools must face.

Case Study

Meaningful Student Involvement was created from the SoundOut Student/Adult Partnerships Project Project. Partnering with government and philanthropic partners, Adam Fletcher, creator of MSI, provided training to staff and nontraditional student leaders at twelve schools across Washington State, including students ages 10 through 18.

One participating high school in suburban Seattle hosted a series of professional development opportunities for adults at the school, and hands-on skill-building and knowledge training courses for students. The student leadership core, comprised of non-traditionally engaged leaders, held a series of events for students from multiple grade levels to share their opinions about schools. After facilitating a school-wide forums for hundreds of students focused on school improvement, students joined committees on curriculum design, standardized testing, and State government compliance. They also made reports to their local school board on how they think schools should change. In the following two years students also became full-voting members of a school redesign project focused on constructing a new building. Their opinions were key to creating a student-centered learning environments.

Today, seven years after the MSI process, students are leaders throughout the school, and learning is viewed as a reciprocal process for everyone in the building. Students, staff, and our community and business partners take responsibility for increasing student learning. According to the school, “This unique team concept results in an average attendance rate of 94%, a graduation rate of 99%, a 100% completion rate on the senior project and a yearly increase in scholarship awards.

Free Youth Worker Coaching

Starting today, CommonAction Consulting, home of The Freechild Project and SoundOut, is offering free 30 minute coaching sessions to youth workers who are out of work or seeking new employment. Speaking directly with Adam Fletcher, the president of CommonAction and a 20-plus year veteran of the youth development field, participants can:

• Review their career aspirations
• Identify new career goals
• Determine next steps for a successful career
• Examine their current resume
• And more

For more information or details send an email to the CommonAction office at info@commonaction.org.