A Spectrum of Engagement

There are places throughout our communities that engage us as people in things outside of ourselves that are larger than ourselves. And then there are other things people do that deeply engage us within ourselves. In a popular culture that seems to pull us into those extremes constantly without attention to balancing our interests, it can be important to acknowledge that there are different positions for different activities throughout our lives.

Today I was working on planning the 2011-12 Seattle Youth Engagement Cadre with Kyla Lackie of SOAR and Lois Brewer of Seattle Public Schools Youth Engagement Zone project. Kyla and I were talking about different ways folks engage throughout their lives when I had an epiphany about how to illustrate this dynamic between self-oriented engagement and socially-oriented engagement. Rather than draw it on a static spectrum I saw the necessity of demonstrating the breadth of value different activities can have towards their given ends. Quickly brainstorming some possibilities, I acknowledged the following patterns emerge in my own work:

Different types of engagement activities affect different people in different ways. The broadest measurement for success in engaging people is how closely they fit a given definition of engagement. I have defined engagement as emotional or psychological connection a person feels with a thing outside of themselves. This definition makes no value judgment about different perspectives and outcomes of engagement; instead, it positions engagement as a non-linear phenomenon both within and outside of an individual.

For the purpose of measuring the efficacy of an activity in relationship to this definition, participants identify a variety of activities that engage people within themselves and in their own lives, and activities that engage people outside of themselves and throughout their whole communities. Activities that may engage a person within themselves could include exercise, listening to music, studying, meditation, and reading. Activities that may engage a person throughout their larger world include reading the newspaper, eating dinner with your family, volunteering at an animal shelter, sitting on a nonprofit board of directors, volunteering for a play, and so forth. Being as specific as possible is useful.

The essential part of this activity happens next: After a brief conversation comparing what they've found in their own identifying of activities, participants would then chart their actions on the following diagram. In this diagram, activities with the most impact on an individual would be charted at the extremes of the spectrum, while activities with the least impact would be in the middle. Participants' worksheets may look something like this:

When completed, participants should have a wide array of activities represented on their Spectrum of Engagement, acknowledging the depth and breadth of engagement activities that are happening throughout a given community.

Let me know what you think!

I Love Teaching!

I love teaching!

Me facilitating a session on student voice at the
National  School Boards Association annual conference.

Let me clarify that I am not talking about classroom teaching or the type of "sit-n-git" training that so many people are used to. Instead, I am talking about sharing my finally honed facilitation skills with learners to allow, encourage, grow, and sustain peoples' inclination for self-leadership throughout their lives. That is what I love, and where I find deep joy and satisfaction.

Over the last month I have trained just under 500 people. Through travel to the Cascade Mountains, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, southeast and central Washington, Seattle, and a few points in between, I have worked with drug and alcohol counselors for youth, teachers, afterschool workers, nonprofit program directors and executive directors, and young people themselves. I have trained about community engagement, the history of youth work, self-sustainability, and a few other things.

One of the things that has left me deeply satisfied lately has been weaving personal development work into my formerly systems change-only thinking. These days I am encouraging learners to delve deeply within themselves in order to explore their personal perspectives, and then to take on changing the world.

I am ready to teach more. After several years of averaging four classes, workshops, and/or speeches every month, and I am ready to double that. Every month I receive a half-dozen inquiries from folks who would like to attend my workshops, but don't have an organization that can host me or the funds to attend one of my other trainings. Today, my goal is to facilitate eight events every month where young people and adults can learn from my work.

Let me know if you're interesting in hosting any of my work on social change and youth, meaningful student involvement, the changing roles of young people throughout society, community engagement in the social agenda, and more. I'm available!

The Dilemma of Hope

The story goes that Dr King would end every meeting of his inner circle with having them gather for prayer, then circle up. They'd then stick their hands in the middle, huddle-style, and chant "Keep hope alive!" Every time.

I have become leery of the evangelists of hope, and I don't believe Dr King was one of them.

Through these decades of experience teaching thousands of young people and adults about community engagement I've come to understand that hope IS a panacea to despair. It serves a role in the hearts of those who've given up, and it's essential for invigorating the hearts and minds of the disconnected.

However, for those who are capable, hope can be a conundrum that presents a roadblock to genuine change. Hope can be a placebo for those who believe change must happen. It salves our restless hearts and codifies our belief that someday, some thing will be different.

The dilemma of hope is that it can suffocate the imagination with it's best intentions. Absent the component of critical thinking, hope becomes a drug that's capable of hooking the masses, reeling them into the danger of just needing another fix. Hope is addictive.

The solution for this is to activate hope through practical, powerful, and positive action. Each of us must take responsibility everyday in every way we possibly can. This can happen at home, in school, during our afterschool hours, and all the time. But it must happen. We must confront the complacency hope sells us.

From there real social change can and will happen. But we must start by challenging the assumption that hope is enough, and for you and me, it will never be. Let's get to work!

Thanks to Reyhan Reid for the comment that brought forth this piece. It's good to get inspired!


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

Written by Adam Fletcher for CommonAction Consulting. It was originally posted at YoungerWorld.org. Contact us for more information by emailing info@commonaction.org or calling +1 (360)489-9680.

Brand New Youth

We live in a rapidly changing time with brand new youth right now. 

More than ever before, young people are surging ahead in our society, creating great new realities that are vastly different from those of their parents and all the generations before them. This is happening right now. More youth are actively engaging in creating, fostering, nurturing, and sustaining substantive social change than ever before. More than ever before, there are young women, young people of color, low income children and youth, and more immigrants than ever seen before who are actively leading, teaching, evaluating, researching, decision-making, advocating, and organizing throughout our society. These are the new roles that The Freechild Project and SoundOut advocate for. Children and youth are addressing radically diverse issues and demanding and creating drastically different realities. This are the rapidly changing times we live in right now. This is what I elaborate, amplify, and celebrate every single day.

Young people are solving poverty right now.
Young people are reinventing education right now.
Young people are reinvigorating spirituality right now.
Young people are energizing democracy right now.
Young people are the future- right now. 

In the meantime, adults are living in a negative trance that is disallowing us from seeing exactly what is happening. We're getting scanned at airports, sucked into cynical television, drum beaten by opportunistic politicians, consumed by parasitic corporations, and thwarted by our own subconscious shackles that keep us in very narrow perspectives of young people. Our own limited views are causing us to see and treat children and youth apathetically, pitifully, and sympathetically, and worst still, sometimes even with antipathy. We enjoy our perspectives of young people, even while they're trying to teach us otherwise.

The world will thrive because of young people today. The stop gap solutions of adults will not continue to serve us. The excuses we have relied on will be proven wrong. The barriers we have relied on to withhold a powerful new future will evaporate at the hands of kids and teens today. Adults play a vital role in the lives of all young people, and that is a simple truth. Luckily though, they're not waiting for us before they get to work.

These brand new youth are with us right now. This is the present right now. 


Are you ready for the future, today?

Build Or Suffer

"We are called to be 
the architects of the future, 
not it's victims."
- Buckminster Fuller

It seems like we're accidental builders, or that a lot of us are. Without intention and without designs, we meet people and go to places. Then we do things and learn. Then we go other places and meet other people. Along the way we make friends, we pull together connections, and we build community. By accident.

In my final year of college I had the chance to reflect on my 14 years experience as a youth worker- that was 2002.  It was during the course of writing a 150-page critical examination of those experiences that I discovered that all my work had a thread I hadn't consciously acknowledged before: I consistently sought jobs where I taught children and youth. That was just beginning to change when I started at The Evergreen State College, the eighth college in my undergraduate experience. But until that point, direct service teaching kids and teens was where my heart and hands were at, and its what caused my mind to explode with ideas and possibilities.

Rather than living life by accident, I had unconsciously threaded together a career with powerful learning and substantive impact. I continued to weave that thread after that, and up to this point it has been very rewarding. But after writing that reflection, I started threading my needle on purpose and weaving with intention. To me, that is being the architect that Bucky talked about above.

How can we deliberately grab life by the horns and live life with intention? How can we not suffer the consequence of unconsciousness and not be victimized by the journeys we are all on in every part of our lives, personal, professional, social, academic, cultural, and so on?

I have spent the last year studying this commandment of "Build or Suffer". I want to build! Throughout all of the rest of my life, I want to be the absolute best dad, partner, teacher, and live-r that I possibly can be! I am excited to keep learning, and am well aware that I have a whole lifetime of opportunity ahead of me. The difference is that today I am designing my learning in all these ways, rather than suffering my unconscious choices. What a life!

Making REAL Community

What is "real" community?

I was facilitating a meeting of the Council of Governments in Ephrata, Washington, last night and stumbled across the notion that people are generally in agreement about what "community" is - "You know, its the people and places and cultures and attitudes that surround us at any given point." All 25 people in the room nodded their heads in agreement.

But then somebody chipped in that that isn't the same as "real" community. "What is 'real' community then?" "Well, it's the people who we are really connected with, who we really "click" with."

Maybe the issue is that we don't really connect or click with very many people. At the turn of the century sociologist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an indictment of modern society's indifference for this idea of "real" community. Using a bunch of different measures for how Americans are involved throughout their communities, Putnam carefully laid out how our social capital is falling because we don't have "real" community around us, and because of that we're all essentially going to hell in a handbasket.

I think that young people are proving this wrong.

Not in droves, and not all at once, but more than ever, young people are connecting meaningfully, powerfully, and purposefully throughout their communities. They're forming and reforming our ideas of what "real" community is, and along the way they're strengthening the places we live and the people we live around.

I want to challenge anyone who isn't sure about what "real" community is, or who doesn't believe that "real" communities are still being grown, to research and meet any one of the powerful communities featured on The Freechild Project website. And then look for "real" community among the young people of your city or town or neighborhood. Guaranteed, some of them have it.

Now, if we could only get them to show what the secret to forming those communities is...

The Heart of Community Partnerships

One of the main issues I have become aware of through my work in democracy building is community partnerships. How many times have I heard people say community partnerships are the hardest part of their work, or that working with (insert) kids/youth/parents/grandparents/families/communities/community groups is almost impossible.

I have learned that getting to the heart of community partnerships is actually a relatively easy move. It is staying there that is hard.

Every person who works with communities- either as a social worker or teacher or youth worker or community organizer or as afterschool staff or nonprofit director or any of dozens of other roles- is inherently positive. It is in the very essence of people who do community work to be positive, and that is the heart of community partnerships: Positivity.

Before you hem and haw at that idea, take a minute to think about why you do the work you do. Why do you want to change the world? Why do you work with youth? Or anybody else? It is because you believe the world can be a better place than it is right now. You believe people can live better than they do now. You believe in a positive future, even if you have never named it that.

So now that you have acknowledged that you are positive, let's get to reality: It is hard to stay positive.

It may seem like we work in unfair circumstances. We are measured against by roughshod accountability goals and half-thought through outcome reporting; we operate from hyper-standardized programs in hyper-diverse communities; we are driven by bombastic community leaders or motivated by hateful, hurtful community depression and abuse. It is a tough reality that many of us face everyday. For young people, the situation is even more dire, as you face a dire future in an apparently ungrateful society that seems hellbent on forgetting your importance to their well-being.

BUT, and that's a BIG but... There is hope, and its all around us. More importantly, there is a better reality facing us right now: That is YOU.

Your postivity is the heart of community partnerships. It is the heart of empathizing deeply with every client, ally, partner, friend, and partner you have, need, or want in your community. By speaking your positivity out loud you will inspire others to connect with you deeply, and by acting out your positivity consciously you will demonstrate the practical power your community wants and needs right now.


So spend time connecting with that part of you that believes deeply in what you are doing, and name its positive powerful potential. Then get to work building the partnerships you know your community needs today and in the future.

In Favor of Adultism?

Over at Wikipedia there's a debate flaring over the article on adultism. Two trains of thought occur in this debate: one regarding the validity of the article and whether there are enough reliable sources in the article to make it a legitimate Wikipedia article; the second focused on the validity of adultism as a topic to be addressed on Wikipedia. Both arguments are worthy debate. However, I find a recurring pattern of discrimination present in the former argument: There are those who firmly believe that adultism should be presented with a neutral definition that does not portray an inherently negative basis. Note that this is different from the treatment racism or hetrosexism receives on Wikipedia, as both of those are presented in their biased forms.

In coming out in favor of a neutral definition of adultism editors will often expose their bias towards adults. As one editor redefined the term, "Adultism the the belief that adults should have inordinate power over children", and "Adultism is the act of exerting inordinate control over children by adults". I believe that these very definitions, by nature of their phrasing, demands the reader to accept this "inordinate control".

I have defined adultism three ways in my writing:

• "Adultism is favoring adults by dismissing young people."
• "Adultism is the addiction to the attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and actions of adults."
• "Adultism promotes the discrimination of children and youth, and bias towards adults."

Reviving my knowledge of the current literature surrounding adultism, I searched across the research databases to find out how adultism has been defined recently. Following is a collection of definitions from throughout the neutral, scholary realm of academic journals and books.

• "...negative construction of the meaning of youth is a form of oppression, referred to as either ageism or 'adultism'." - C.A. MacNeil, "Bridging generations: Applying “adult” leadership theories to youth leadership development", in ''New Directions for Youth Development'' (2006).
• "Adultism... can be defined as the inherent belief that adults are ultimate experts on youth, their issues, dreams, anxieties, abilities, and health; adults are thus thrust into positions of ultimate decision-makers and arbiters of policies, programs, and services involving youth." - M. Delgado and D. Zhao, ''Youth-led health promotion in urban communities: A community capacity-enhancement perspective''. Rowman & Littlefield (2008).
• "...an antiyouth bias sometimes called 'adultism'..." - D. Hosang., "Family and community as the cornerstone of civic engagement: Immigrant and youth organizing in the southwest" in ''National Civic Review'' (2006). 
• "If we define abuse as restricting, controlling, humiliating, or hurting another, it's clear that abuse is a daily experience for young people. We have a new word for it: adultism." C. Close,  "Fostering youth leadership: students train students and adults in conflict resolution" in ''Theory into Practice'' (2007).

These definitions show a clear patterning of negative perspectives in the defining of adultism. However, given the apparently predominant perspective of at least one Wikipedia editor, Wikipedia will soon feature a supposedly neutral definition.

Reviewing the definitions I have previously used in the Wikipedia article, I found this an active trending towards exposing the discriminatory basis of adultism by authors from across the realms. However, many of the following sources are questionable to Wikipedia editors who find them to be from "advocacy organizations" or authors with dubious bases for their assertions about adultism. (I personally find that perspective discriminatory, as it alienates perspectives, but for the sake of process I'll accept it.) Following are some of those definitions.

• "[Adultism is] behaviors and attitudes based on the assumptions that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without agreement." J. Bell (1995) "Understanding Adultism" on the YouthBuild USA website.
• "Oppression of Young People (from the day they are born), based on their age, by care givers (who are used as the oppression agents) and by the society and its institutions." - Co-counseling.
• "Adultism is an adult practice of forming certain beliefs about young people and practicing certain behaviors toward them because of societal views, usually negative, that are based on their age." - Child Welfare League of America.
• "Addressing adultist behavior by calling it ageism is discrimination against youth in itself." - Youth On Board.

It is interesting to see how the tides of discrimination vary, washing back and forth over the bones of justice. We should take a close examination of our own biases before calling out others', and afterwards revisit this conversation with a thorough acceptance of our own perspectives.

Am I a Bad Wikipedia Editor?

As I look deeper into the issue of anti-youth bias on Wikipedia, I find that I am frequently the target of these AfDs and TfDs. An editor called Herostratus called me out directly in a recent AfD, writing,

It's a Freechild special, and it's an advocacy article (a particularly noxious form of advocacy to my mind...) Freechild is nobody's fool and he's an energizer bunny when it comes to digging up enough refs for these things. He's done his homework and he's got us over a barrel. If his hobbyhorse was global warming denial or Scientology or whatever he'd have his head handed to him, but that's not going to happen given the subject and the Wikipedia demographic, so I'd say we have to let it go.

In responding to me calling them out about their personal attack, Herostratus replied by saying, "If you're going to be a radical and POV-pusher here you'd best have a thick skin." I appreciate that, and according to another editor not only do I have thick skin, but I must be fat. Describing a photo of me during a 2005 AfD focused on the Wikipedia page about me, a user called Ashley Pomeroy got ugly and waged a personal attack, writing,

"I am also overweight, and I have pondered whether a goatee beard would help hide this, but I've never really had the courage to just let it grow."

The editor called Herostratus has an axe to grind against me, as they have called me out repeatedly in the past. In 2007 they slammed me during an AfD for pedophobia, writing,

"Your essay (and this is what it is, not an encyclopedia article) transparently attempts to conflate medical and sociological terminolgy for advocacy purposes. Scholarly journals don't fall for that. Sorry to be harsh, but there it is."

During an 2008 AfD for Fear of youth, Herostratus continued by writing,

The main protector of this article is freechild and this is no coincidence, this article was designed and is maintained as an unsubtle POV hammer. Sure it has a lot of citations; good original essays do.

Calling something original research on Wikipedia is a way of calling out it's illegitimacy; calling it a "POV hammer" is a way of saying that it's someone's personal point of view and that they're using Wikipedia to drive the point home. Herostratus has established a 4-year-old pattern of haunting my edits and accusing me of bad editing behavior.

However, with widespread response and the continued concern of more than one editor, perhaps there is more for me to learn about editing on Wikipedia. A user called orlady has commented on my AfDs and talk pages related to articles I have created or edited repeatedly. Her concern repeats throughout, and is generally summarized by this comment from a comment she wrote on the Youth Empowerment template talk page in 2007,

I don't see the point of this template, except perhaps as a way to gather/advertise the personal interests of one particular Wikipedia contributor.

Maybe I'm a bad Wikipedia editor. Thoughts?

Anti-Youth Bias on Wikipedia

Tonight I've been thinking about the anti-youth bias on Wikipedia.

Systemic bias is a serious charge on Wikipedia. According to the special project page about the topic on Wikipedia, systemic bias "...naturally grows from its contributors' demographic groups, manifesting an imbalanced coverage of a subject, thereby discriminating against the less represented demographic groups." This is especially true of the presence of adults on WP, who form the age of majority on the website. It is because of this systemic bias that I want to raise awareness about an ongoing trend of discrimination against youth-focused topics on WP.

After introducing a series of articles from the field of youth studies, I have seen articles addressing youth-focused issues be routinely subjected to the process known as Articles for Discussion on WP. These "AfDs" are essentially conversations focused on whether to keep or delete an article on WP. There is a pseudo-voting process, and in these discussions on these youth-focused articles editors tend to call out the validity of the topics rather than the worthiness of the articles themselves, often dismissing the verifiability and neutral point of view, which the core of WP article writing.

Note that oftentimes concern for these articles and templates are pointed at me directly, accusing me of article ownership and bias; however, this pattern of AfDs and TfDs ranges further than my direct editing. Following is the pattern I would like to draw attention to.

The AfDs include:

• Adultism
• Ephebiphobia
• Fear of youth
• Pedophobia
• Youth subculture
• Youngest mayors in the U.S.
• Student voice

The only youth-focused template on WP is focused on youth empowerment, and it has been taken to Templates for Discussion not once, but twice.

There is also a pattern of discrimination against editors who identify themselves as middle or high school students, or as being under 18, or as youth; however, this bias is harder to demonstrate given the difficulty of searching editors' talk pages.


The closest Wikipedia has come to having a conversation on this is a conversation started on the ageism talk page in 2007. There needs to be more conversation. Any responses are appreciated.

False Choice Kills Social Change

We are faced with piles of choices every single day. Advertising pumps tons of clothing and cars, household cleaners and soda for us to choose from. Our friends and communities make these choices seem more real, as we are surrounded by people who want the same things, and everyone strives towards similar goals. 

However, at what point are those false choices? At what point do those choices distract and take away from the real choices we need to make in our lives?

Renata Salecl, an economist in London, recently claimed in an RSA video that, "The ideology of choice is actually not so optimistic and it prevents social change." She laid out a compelling argument that highlights how the majority of choices we are faced with everyday are simple consumerist myths that perpetuate our sense of choosing without actually giving us a say about what we're choosing - they are false choices. She identifies how these choices drive some of us to believe we are being impinged on by false choices, driving us to create new options that in turn become placebos for meaningful decision-making. 

Worst still, Salecl implies that these choices are distracting us from more serious decision-making by filling our minds with rubbish. This "fullness", apparently re-enforced by a New York Times article called, "Too Many Choices: A Problem that can Paralyze", which puts consumer choices on par with substantive choices like who should govern us or whether we should go to war. Or, the NY Times is apparently honing in on the outcomes of this rubbish by reporting on a study about "decision-making fatigue", which apparently seeks to absolve the Average American from their responsibilities over their lives and work and families by acknowledging that we are simply faced with too many choices to be able to function successfully every single day. All this, and personal exposure to younger and older people who "suffer" this way, leads me to agree with Salecl.

We are surrounded by a cacophony of phony, the allure of the unreal. It seems incredible to me that so many people- young and old- actively choose to fill their lives with impediments to their power. It is as if we are actively surrendering our ability to make the world we want to live in. It was Paulo Freire who first taught me that the highest order of being human is to be a maker rather than a consumer. However, as a people we are suffocating under a pile of consumption.

Social change requires the active belief that we are fully capable and desirous of making the world we want to live in. We must actively choose to do that every single day, be it through actively eschewing television and teaching our kids to stay away from it, or by denying the commercial overload that would take over our lives by living simply and within our means. False choices are killing social change.

It is from that place of unhindered decision-making that we can develop the critical consciousness and social awareness necessary to change the world. It is from that place that we can make a real difference.