Youth Engagement in Ohio

OPEC Youth Engagement Seminar 2018 Adam Fletcher

There are learnings about youth engagement everywhere there are young people, and every learning is different and unique, as well as similar and familiar. For the last few days, I’ve been at Miami University in Ohio learning about youth engagement with adult practitioners here. This is the at OPEC (Ohio Promoting WEllness & ReCovery) Conference, an annual gathering of youth workers, teachers, prevention/intervention specialists, counselors, administrators, executives and others who are involved throughout the field. Its a tremendous gathering, and I’m humbled to be here.

Today, I facilitated a 9-hour seminar focused on Project-Based Learning. It was an exciting day, filled with so much collaborative learning and so many generative processes that my I left with a full heart and amazed mind. Excitement bubbled throughout the day, with almost 50 people creating community, connecting with their peers and teaching each other the positive, powerful potential of Project Based Learning. It was exciting!

One of the most powerful activities we did was creating new learning about youth engagement specifically. After sharing our definitions, I explained that my research and practice has shown that youth engagement is simply young people doing the act of choosing the same thing over and over. Either it happens unconsciously or consciously, meaningful or otherwise, good or challenging. After talking about that for a while, we answered some key questions about youth engagement. I want to share the group’s responses to some of those questions here. Following are six questions, and the responses to our brainstorming.

1. How Does Youth Engagement Happen?

Slowly
When adults give youth a voice and choice
With buy-in from everyone
Persistence
Organically
As a process
Opportunity
By having opportunities to connect and feel empowered
Authenticity of the leader/ adult ally/ mentor
Showing them that they matter
After much head banging and the sound of crickets chirping
As a facilitator: I listen… I create space/ activity… and fun!!
By being a living example of how life can be and all the possibilities that exist
By giving responsibility/ say to target group
Adults getting their egos out of the way
With support of the community
Buy-in from adults
With consistency
Give them the opportunity
With patience, time and comittment
Perspective

2. Why Does Youth Engagement Matter?

Help youth find their purpose
Positive use of time
Youth are invested in something bigger than themselves
Hope for the future
They’re our kids!
Creates meaningful engagement for a lifetime
Avoid wasting time, energy and money on a strategy that doesn’t work
Matters for the future
Life change
Change to happen
It enhances the community (is better)
Empowerment
Better health and social outcomes in the community/ relationships/ individual
Higher protective factors, fewer risk factors
So they feel like they belong and matter
Future healthy adults
Because no matter who you are or where you come from every person has value and can contribute their voice to make a positive difference in their community
To ensure the youth can be productive citizens in the community
Empower the next generation
Create positive change
To understand their identity
Community change
For society!! and what’s to come
Our humanity is dependent on it
Students do not always know what’s best
It matters because it redirects their energy, it lets them know they matter and gives them a sense of purpose

3. When Does Youth Engagement Happen?

When we listen to our youth
When we really care
When a connection is made
Daily and when students initiate with direction
When you make it relate to them
When they can express their passion
When youth are in pain looking for something different/ more than their current experience and situation
All the time!
Throughout a lifetime
When you people are part of the decision-making process
When we create the space or join it!
When prevention folks put in extra effort
When I stay out of it!
When they are able to take possession (own it)
When they are listened to
When adults stop talking long enough to listen
When adults listen
When youth believe in what they are doing
When kids are treated as experts in the topic or “them”
When youth see beyond themselves

4. What Does Youth Engagement Do?

Encourages
Reduces abuse
Empowers youth
Improves communication
Leads the pack
Creates opportunity
“Plants seeds of change”
Changes directions of ones’ life
Empower!
Build life skills
Fosters leaders and followers for all sectors and levels of society
Creative outcomes
Moves mountains
Access most valuable resources: Our Youth!
Helps to ensure we create youth who will change the world
Provides vision
Builds relationship
Connects generations
Gives knowledge
Builds confidence
(can) Creates safe space
Empowers young people
Builds skills
Offers hope
Creates change agents in the community

5. Who Is Youth Engagement For?

The City of Columbus, families, and the continuous business growth of our city (purposeful, financially sound, etc.)
Communities, families and peers
Me
Everyone!
Middle and high school youth in Union County but also all youth and youth workers
For all the youth in the community and adults involved with them
All people invested in young people
Students of Lucas County – ALL of them!
Community
Whole community
Local, national and global communities
Inner city – low income families and youth! As well as the program facilitators and mentors
Summit and Medina County students
The community
The rural Appalachian youth covering 2,600 square miles we serve in Ross, Pickaway, Pike, Fayette and Highland Counties
Middle and high school students in Clement Co.
Afterschool program at middle school – 70% free/ reduced lunch

6. Where Does Youth Engagement Happen

Anywhere!
School
Summer camps
Online
Texting
In relationship
Where there is youth!
Family night engagement activities with afterschool students
Community
After school
In school
At home
Social network
Anywhere that you show intentional use of self
Wherever they are
Afterschool and in the community
With our communications
In our neighborhood
In the hearts and minds of our youth
Now – anywhere!
Across the social ecological model
Where there is love
Coalition meetings
School, home, anywhere
Parent-free areas (not the good youth engagement)
Everywhere
Anywhere there are youth
Where there is need and the desire to make a difference
Everywhere
Wherever the message and connection happens
In the streets
Afterschool youth center
In our homes
School
Summer camps
Online
Texting
In relationships

There was so much information shared in this GREAT seminar! Watch for another post coming with a great artistic creation by the group.

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Elsewhere Online

OPEC Guest Speaker: Adam Fletcher

Youth Engagement at Home

These are the Principles of Youth Parent Partnerships, created by a group of 500 youth in Durham, North Carolina in 1998.

Youth engagement starts at home. This post offers some of my thoughts about that reality, as well as steps to ensuring that youth engagement happens in your family. I also share some of the experiences I’ve had with youth engagement at home.

Basic Thoughts

These are barriers to Youth Engagement at home identified by youth and parents in my last workshop. — These are some barriers to Youth Engagement at home identified by youth and parents in my last workshop.

I’ve started defining the word engagement as choosing the same thing over and over. There are many kinds of youth engagement at home:

Psychological engagement
Physical engagement
Emotional engagement
Intellectual engagement
Social engagement
Cultural engagement

…and so on. Within their homes, youth can be engaged with their families, including parents, siblings or other family members; their physical spaces like their bedrooms or backyards; activities like housework or video games; feelings like love and security; ideas like belonging and importance, and; many other things.

With all those possibilities, its easy to see how youth engagement starts at home. The elements of our family life determine how we engage with the world beyond our front door, including at school, in our communities, at work, in public, and everywhere else. If youth experience crappy engagement at home, youth are more likely to be disengaged in their lives – not always, all the time, but often in many ways.

Through my research and practice, I’ve found there are three things all parents can do to build youth engagement at home:

Listen to youth. Your offspring are yearning to be heard, no matter what age, what space and what condition your family is in. They might not show that desire, they might act the opposite of caring, and they might not be aware they have a voice—but they want to be heard.
Take action with youth. Don’t stop at listening to your kids—actually do things with them! Make, build, clean, connect and show your care and connection by being with youth directly, in each others’ spaces and sharing each others’ time.
Think about it. Youth engagement at home requires critical thinking about yourself, your parenting, your beliefs and your future. Is this how you want youth to live? Are these the things you want to do in your family? Be critical of your parenting and take action to change it.

As parents, we all screw up. The difference between the conscious parent and the unthinking parent is the energy they spend becoming more fair, just and equitable. We don’t want equality between youth and parents, we want equity. There’s a difference, and youth engagement at home makes us think about it.

My Experience

These are questions I asked related to Youth Parent Partnerships.

I’m a dad for four kids between the ages of 10 and 15. They are beautiful, strong-hearted kids full of all the challenge, vigor, suffering and joy of youth, and I love them. However, I screw up too, and I’ve learned to accept that. I learn a lot from my experience as a parent.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve heard the tenants of my life: Childhood homelessness; family PTSD; Vietnam veteran father; poverty-stricken family that moved into low-income lifestyle; generational depression; minority neighborhood background; academic struggles; found my soulcraft at age 14; only kid in family to graduate high school on time; first in family to earn a bachelors degree; built my life’s work from The Freechild Project and SoundOut focused on youth engagement and Meaningful Student Involvement; wrote 50+ publications; spoke and taught and consulted around the world; still screwing up every day.

Throughout 2018, I’ve been facilitating the Parent-Youth Connections Seminar in King County, Washington, where Seattle is surrounded by suburbs, exurbs and more in all of its explosive boom-era angst and glory. Along the way, the community has chosen to investments on infants, children and youth throughout the county. One of these investments is through the King County Superior Courts, and its the program I’m facilitating.

For several years, the project taught parents and youth about youth development and adolescent brain development as a diversion to prevent youth incarceration. A successful project, it operated for several years and successfully kept a lot of young people out of jail.

Early this year, I was contracted to facilitate the program. In my initial contact with the courts, I explained that rather than taking the tact they’d traditionally espoused, I was going to veer toward youth engagement. These are some of my findings so far. There’ve been more than 100 participants in these 12-hour sessions so far, coming from a variety of racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and economic backgrounds.

Stay tuned as I learn more and start distilling all this into actionable change. My first product related to youth engagement at home is called the Parent Youth Engagement Seminar, and I’ll be launching it soon.

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Not What You Think

Over the years, I’ve worked with a variety of different young people to build youth voice. When I was younger, some people did that for me, too, despite our differences. I was an immigrant kid from the country, a rodeo rider who wore cowboy boots and corduroy pants.

Later, I was a homeless kid and then lived in a low-income neighborhood. Generational PTSD and addiction flowed easily in my family, and my social defense mechanisms were high – biting humor and cynical perspectives and many other signs.

I was not what you think. Instead, I was a dynamic, empowered and excited young person who bumped into some rough edges, was challenged to grow and change, and became who I am today. And I’m still growing and changing.

As I sit here in Seattle, I’ve just closed my second Parent Youth Connection Seminar. The young people here are generally seen and treated as disengaged, but as the brainstorm here shows, they are anything but. I would tell anyone who asked that its not what you think.

What are you engaged in?

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Parent Youth Connections Seminar
Voices of the Damned Youth
My Fragmented Youth

How Do We Fix Adultism?

Youth Engagement: Start anywhere, go everywhere with every youth and every adult in every community all of the time.

When I was asked how to fix adultism recently, I got deep! I want to share with you what I wrote:

I approach anti-adultism by addressing individual attitudes; shared cultures, and; systemic structures, and I use the systems change mantra “Start anywhere and go everywhere.”

So if you begin with individual attitudes, start anywhere and go everywhere: Read books yourself; talk frankly with youth and adults about adultism; teach others to identify and address adultism; directly challenge indifference, intransigence and apathy toward youth yourself; and so on.

If you begin with cultural transformation, start anywhere and go everywhere: Facilitate learning experiences for youth and adults; create advertising campaigns that disturb adultism where it happens; directly intervene and challenge any public instance of adultism; raise consciousness by writing and talking and practicing anti-adultism.

If you begin with systemic structures, start anywhere and go everywhere: Challenge any adultism rules and guidelines wherever you are, including schools, nonprofits, businesses, and home; talk with candidates for elected office about adultism, and stand with anyone who supports changing laws, policies and guidelines that promote adultism; create policy change proposals and legislative campaigns to address adultist rules and behaviors; promote people who serve youth taking anti-adultism classes, including teachers, youth workers, parents and others in order to fight adultism where it happens through policy change; and so on.

Ultimately, start anywhere and go everywhere, no matter what you do: Start.

What do you think of my response? Share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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Adam Speaking at the Teens Care Too Youth Summit in Vancouver, Washington

Adam F. C. Fletcher speaking at the 2018 Teens Care Too Youth Summit in Vancouver, Washington

In this video, I’m keynoting at the 2018 Teens Care, Too! Youth Summit in Vancouver, Washington. The topic of my talk, “Ownership Is Just What We Do,” reflected the summit’s theme. Centering on my personal story, I touched base on owning our stories, owning our communities and owning the future, together.

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Parent Youth Connections Seminar

The Parent-Youth Connections Seminar, or PYCS, was a project of the King County Superior Court with primary focus on early intervention for low-risk youth involved in the court system. Focused on providing fun, interactive seminars to low-risk youth offenders and a parent or other connected adult, Adam Fletcher facilitated the program throughout 2018 as a principal consultant with The Athena Group.

Together, youth and adults explore youth engagement, community empowerment and social change. They explore the skills, knowledge and actions needed to change their lives and the world around them.

Project Description

In this project, Adam designed and facilitated a 12-hour research-driven program designed to engage and empower families to change their lives. The Parent Youth Connections Seminar used intensive hands-on, interactive and focused activities, to engage parents and youth as they worked together to learn new knowledge, explore previous practices and grow new possibilities for their families. Over two-days, each session featured four workshops for learners of all ages including adult-only and youth-only groups.

The purpose of the Parent Youth Connections Seminar was to engage youth and caring adults in critical topics that would empower young people to make better decisions, be leaders in the future and change their lives in positive ways.

Workshop topics include:

Youth voice
Community involvement
Facing stereotypes
Changing communication
Establishing and maintaining power, trust and respect
Individual and Family Strengths and Weaknesses
Action planning and problem-solving everyday
Finding real adult support

During each seminar, Adam ensured that participants were actively involved, heard engaging stories, completed challenging activities, participated in powerful reflection, discovered useful resources for the future and more.

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Elsewhere Online

The Athena Group official website
King County Superior Court official website

Adam Fletcher Advocating Youth Engagement in Communities

The crisis of disengagement facing youth today is shameful. There are so many issues youth can become active in and so many actions they can take our communities have no reason not to engage every youth and every adult everywhere all the time. But somehow, they don’t. Adam Fletcher works with nonprofits, government agencies and other organizations to build youth engagement throughout communities.

Following are Adam Fletcher’s tools for youth engagement in communities. Contact him.

Adam Fletcher’s Tools Supporting Youth Engagement in Communities

Adam Fletcher’s Books

Adam Fletcher’s Free Publications

Adam Fletcher’s Website on Youth Engagement

The Freechild Project

Adam Fletcher’s Articles

Articles about Youth Engagement in Communities

Adam Fletcher’s Services Supporting Youth Engagement in Communities

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“7 Steps to Connect Young People And Social Change” by Adam
“Democracy Building in the United States” by Adam
“What Is Youth Engagement?” by Adam

Click here for Adam Fletcher’s resources on

Adam Fletcher Advocating Youth Engagement in Schools

What You Need to Change the World by Adam Fletcher for adamfletcher.net

There is an engagement gap facing every school today, and Adam Fletcher can help you bridge that gap. Based in research and experience, Adam facilitates professional development for educators, training for students, project consultation for education agencies, and much more. He speaks at conferences, writes for journals and periodicals, and has authored several books.

Following are Adam Fletcher’s tools for youth engagement in schools. Contact him.

Adam Fletcher’s Tools Supporting Youth Engagement in Schools

Adam Fletcher’s Books

Adam Fletcher’s Free Publications

Adam Fletcher’s Website about Youth Engagement in Schools

SoundOut

Adam Fletcher’s Articles about Youth Engagement in Schools

Adam Fletcher’s Services Supporting Youth Engagement in Schools

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Click here for Adam Fletcher’s resources on

American Institutes for Research Technical Assistance Program

From 2009 to 2013, Adam consulted the American Institutes for Research (AIR) Technical Assistance Program focused on youth involvement in systems of care. Supported by SAMSHA, this project was designed by AIR to provide nationwide support for youth in foster care as they became systems advocates for transforming, sustaining and advocating change in their lives and the lives of those who came after them.

Adam consulted in many roles for AIR, including providing expert guidance for staff and grantees across the country, and co-writing a national guidance manual. He also keynoted several national gatherings, trained local grantees, and assisted in the evaluation and reporting of activities.

“Adam truly cares about people; nowhere is this more evident than in his passion for creating inclusive communities with a space for everyone. His passion for youth engagement is contagious and I appreciate his ability to challenge us be our better selves so that we can live in better communities that support and honor us all.”—Reyhan Reid, Program Coordinator, American Institutes for Research

Category Archives: Adam Fletcher

Youth Engagement in Ohio

1. How Does Youth Engagement Happen?

2. Why Does Youth Engagement Matter?

3. When Does Youth Engagement Happen?

4. What Does Youth Engagement Do?

5. Who Is Youth Engagement For?

6. Where Does Youth Engagement Happen

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Elsewhere Online

Youth Engagement at Home

Basic Thoughts

My Experience

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KPFA Interview about Adultism, Youth Engagement and More

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Not What You Think

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How Do We Fix Adultism?

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Adam Speaking at the Teens Care Too Youth Summit in Vancouver, Washington

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Parent Youth Connections Seminar

Project Description

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Elsewhere Online

Adam Fletcher Advocating Youth Engagement in Communities

Adam Fletcher’s Tools Supporting Youth Engagement in Communities

Adam Fletcher’s Services Supporting Youth Engagement in Communities

You Might Also Be Interested In…

Adam Fletcher Advocating Youth Engagement in Schools

Adam Fletcher’s Tools Supporting Youth Engagement in Schools

Adam Fletcher’s Services Supporting Youth Engagement in Schools

You Might Also Be Interested In…

American Institutes for Research Technical Assistance Program

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Elsewhere Online