- Good afternoon.
My name's Matt Calvert, and I'm a professor of youth
development with UW-Extension Cooperative Extension,
and today I'm talking about youth development is
community development, and I'm focusing on 10
years of extension youth work that I've been involved in to
think about how when we are intentional our youth
development efforts can grow communities.
And I believe that UW-Extension and Extension nationally
is in a position to make an enormous difference in
the lives of communities and youth, but we need to be
intentional and we need to communicate the
value of our work to build communities to the public in both
the youth development and community development fields.
So one thing we're going to do today is try on one method
of communicating and discovering our impact that we can
do with communities.
We'll be doing that a little bit together, and hopefully it
helps us think about ways that extension can strengthen
our work to build democracy and to build communities
while we work with young people.
And I just want to start out with a couple of grounding
pieces that are pretty familiar to the folks in this room.
Our work is generally rooted in what we call positive youth
development, as opposed to prevention or as opposed to
strictly educational programs.
And in positive youth development, we work to create
environments that give young people opportunities to
experience attachments.
So they belong to something.
They may belong to a community 4-H club, they may
belong to another program, but they may strengthen their
attachment and belonging to their whole community.
We also work toward independence, giving young people
an opportunity to experience autonomy, self-direction, to
see themselves in the future, and, in our context, to see
themselves as a leader in the community.
We work to build mastery so that young people
are able to achieve in a lot of different opportunities.
That can be through a whole wide array of project work we
do or experiences that we offer in community leadership.
And then the purpose of doing this, to a great extent, is to
develop a sense of purpose and a sense of generosity and
to help young people be contributing members of society,
contributing family members, and contributing to their own
personal lives.
And so we're going to be exploring some practices today
that connect youth development and community
development, and they're rooted in a couple of other
practices that I'll be talking about that aren't
necessarily always familiar to the general public.
One is that we work in youth/adult partnership, by which
we mean that young people and adults are working together.
They are collaborating.
They are bringing the strong point, they're bringing the
strengths from young people and strengths from adults to
any situation, relying on each to be equal partners to the
extent that we can.
Then the second piece is that we really work on authentic
and experiential learning situations.
We don't tend to do artificial kind of environments.
We really want young people to be experiencing real work,
whether it's working on a project or working in a community
setting, that this is the real deal and so it really
has meaning.
So, why do we want to link youth
and community development?
Why can't we just talk about youth development by itself?
Well, one is that successful youth development efforts,
especially if you think about young people moving from
youth to adulthood, involves participating and contributing
in a wider community.
So if we think about what's the difference between being a
young person and being an adult.
When you're young, your primary context is your family,
perhaps your school, other things very, very close to home.
As you become an adult, you expand your sphere.
As you age, you expand your sphere into adolescence and
adulthood, and by the time you're an adult, we hope that
you're fully participating in the community, that you're
providing leadership, that you're a citizen ready to be a
voter and everything else we ask for
young people, for adults in our community.
So, one of the things that separates youth from adulthood
is community engagement.
And so as we develop young people we want to make sure
they are experiencing that opportunity to grow into being
community involved and then become the kind of adults
that we need.
The second piece is that we live in a time in history where
youth and adults are perhaps more isolated than they ever
have been in the past.
If you think about 150 to 200 years ago perhaps,
a 20-year-old would be very, very unlikely to be in school,
would probably have already started a family, would be
contributing to an economy in a different way.
They've probably have had years of apprenticeship
working in some meaningful and productive capacity.
Think about 20-year-olds today.
Most of them are experiencing a period of
extended adolescence.
They're still in education.
We're preparing them for something different, but their
brains are in the same place, their needs are the same as
they were 200 years ago, or 5,000 years ago
for that matter.
And so youth and adults tend to be more, young people
tend to be in this extended adolescence, and you also
think about the context that they're growing up in.
Young people are in schools.
They're in youth organizations that are largely separated
from the world of adults.
They're not working side by side productively, maybe aside
from outside of their family.
And so young people and adults are more isolated than ever.
And this is something that I wrote about with some
colleagues, Shep Zeldin and Linda Camino, a number of
years ago in a social policy report, if you want to think
more about the isolation of youth and adults.
And when we ask young people what do they think about
that, the search institute has identified 40 assets that
young people, that communities can provide to young
people in order to help them thrive.
The two lowest assets, guess what they are?
They are whether young people feel like they're valued by
their communities, and whether they're given useful roles
in their communities.
And so, we've been looking at successful community
change work across the nation and sustainable community
development work, and we see examples everywhere
where youth engagement and having young people
involved in that process can really help move those efforts
forward, and a lot of those examples are represented here
in UW Extension and Cooperative Extension.
So I think we have a lot of opportunities to learn from each
other as we come together.
So I want to just paint a picture of Florence, Wisconsin,
a small community up on the border of the Upper Peninsula
in Michigan, just as to think about an example of young
people being involved in community development.
And when I first joined UW Extension in 2004, it was a time
of budget cuts in the public school system, and the
Florence schools were on the edge of closing.
To make matters worse, the Florence school is the only
school district in the entire county, so young people,
students would have had to been bused to neighboring
counties quite a long distance, in some
cases two hours away from their homes.
And, also, if we think about what happens to a small
community when it loses its school?
How is it a different place?
How does it feel different, what's that sense of identity?
So the young people, of course, were concerned about
this, as were other folks in the community, and they were
trying to pass a bond levy which had failed twice,
as I was told.
And the young people were in a public meeting to discuss
the future of their school, and people who were concerned
about their tax burdens and were opposing the levy told
the young people that they were
really, it was too expensive to educate them, we really
couldn't afford to have, they were really too expensive.
They were implied that the community would be better off if
it didn't have so many young people.
And then, secondly, they accused the youth of being
pawns of the teachers.
That it was really the teachers who had set them up to
come out and advocate for the school.
And with Extension leadership bringing those young
people together, they thought about how can we reframe
that story.
Not that we're in the business of telling people how to vote
or anything like that, but there was, the young people felt
like they weren't being appreciated.
And so under the leadership of both youth development
cand community development, people, colleagues in
Florence County UW-Extension, they said young people
need to be proving their value to the community.
We need to find ways to demonstrate how young people
are important to the community.
So they got out and got engaged in a whole myriad of
service activities and community contribution activities.
They built a ramp on the house of someone who'd
become disabled.
They helped the community design a fishing pier so
visitors to the community would have a place to fish
at the lake.
They worked to create welcome signs to the community.
And the metal shop at the school created one for each of
the seasons.
So they hung a different metal sign up for winter, spring,
summer, and fall to emphasize the sort of seasonal
activities in the community.
So the young people really did things that were extremely
visible to the community and also brought them into
contact with all kinds of adults and different projects
in the community.
And on the fourth vote, they finally passed their levy.
That school is still open today, and we'll come back around
to that story of Florence and how they've moved forward
as we go through our story today.
And this case study was also, there's more detail in a New
Directions for Youth Development Issue, and that's
referenced at the end of the presentation if people want to
learn a little bit more.
And you might wonder looking at the picture there,
those are some young people and Extension colleagues
standing in front of a messy looking sign.
And what that is is a ripple effect map of their
community efforts.
This actually is kind of a model.
This isn't the one they're standing in front of.
But the idea is that it looks at the inner level,
that red level, at what young people are directly doing,
who's directly affected.
The next level out, the blue level, thinks about
who else benefits.
So, who's indirectly benefited?
So a visitor to the community might have benefited from
the fishing pier, for example.
And the third level out is taking a look at what systems are
different in the community, and how are people working
together at the community level differently.
And around the outside are these seven words, and I'll talk
about those.
Those are the community capitals.
So what we're going to do, what I'm going to attempt to do
today is take what we've used in some really specific
cases to help a group of young people and their adult
partners think about their impact at the community level
and use that as a way to think about Extension's work in
doing community development with young people.
So, we're going to try this on as a way to sort of think
about Extension's role and youth's role in doing
community development.
So, first, let's talk about the community capitals that are
around the outside.
There are seven community capitals.
Those are identified by Cornelia Flora and her colleagues.
The first is natural capital, the environment, the natural
resources that are available to a community.
Second is cultural capital.
That's the ways of being in a community.
It could be ethnic cultural traditions, but it could also be
we're a community that gets along or we're a community
that's active or we're a community that promotes the arts.
Those all would be cultural things.
Or we're a community that values young people.
So those are cultural values in a community.
Human capital, folks are probably familiar with.
That's the skills that people have, their educational
background, that sort of thing.
Social capital is the networks among people
and the level of trust.
If you think about a community where everyone mistrusts
each other and there's an issue in the community, are they
well positioned to work together?
Not as well positioned to be if they already have
relationships, they're already able to move forward.
If you think about the difference between the starting point
of a community that has trusting relationships in place.
The next one is political capital.
So the political institutions in a community,
whether they're corrupt, whether they're inclusive,
whether everyone feels like they have a voice
in the community.
Financial capital, of course.
The money available to invest in a community, the wealth
of a community.
And, finally, built capital.
The roads, the infrastructure, the internet, whether you
have high speed internet and other things like that.
And so, a community is a system that draws on all these
assets, and they really need to be in balance because if
you have one of them that's out of whack, unhealthy
politics for example, if you don't have
an effective political system, your community is not able to
deal with things.
If you have environmental problems, a big environmental
issue, then that's going to affect a lot of things about
your community, including its wealth and other things.
Like we said before, a lack of trust can even be an asset
that a community can, if they don't have that asset,
then they would suffer.
And we talk about these as capital because these are
really resources that a community has, and they can invest
to create new resources long into the future.
Even something as intangible as social relationships and
trust is a resource that can be drawn on, and it's kind
of in the bank for the community to move forward.
The other thing about thinking about capital in this
community capital sense is that it really draws
our attention to place.
That these are local assets, that it's the geographic, the
community is immediately around people, that it has a
great deal of affect.
That they're interdependent, that they interact with each
other, that there's balance between all of them, and that
what we'll be exploring here is whether there's a bit of a
ripple effect.
So if you can strengthen a capital in one area, how does
that ripple into some of the other areas in thinking about
how young people can be a part of working with
community capitals.
So, I have one more framework to throw at you, and then I
promise I'll quit for a minute on that.
So this is something that, again, is familiar to folks
in the room.
It's Cooperative Extension's vision of our
educational priorities.
And that slide is probably a little bit hard to read, but we
have four different areas that we are working on
in the public.
The first is helping to build a resilient
and productive environment.
The second is to build a stronger economy.
The third is to increase food safety, food security,
and health.
And the fourth, the one we'll be talking about today, is
building thriving youth, families, organizations,
and communities.
And within each of those big areas there are three levels.
Working at the individual level, so helping individuals,
helping organizations, and then working at
the community level.
And so for the area of thriving youth, families,
organizations, and communities, the goal is to create
contributing community members.
So if we think about our young people, in what ways are
they contributing to our communities?
The second is, do we have organizations that can get
together and work together cross-sectorally to deal with
community issues and take advantage of opportunities?
And at the community level, it's building civil
and inclusive civic engagement.
So we are going to try ripple effect mapping at that level,
of each of those levels.
So, first, thinking about how do our community youth
development programs create contributing
community members?
How do individuals participate in this?
Second, how are we building cross-sector collaboration?
And then, third, how are we using community youth
development to promote civility and inclusive
civic engagement?
So the process is designed to help groups think about,
all right, we took on a project, we did an activity,
that affected some other folks positively, and then
that also changed some things about the community,
and people are working together differently.
And we've adapted this.
Some of the folks in the room are nodding.
They've used this model.
We had a national US Department of Agriculture Rural
Youth Development Program that I worked with to use this
as a piece of their evaluation process nationally, and a lot
of valuable information came from it.
And we've traditionally used it as a way to help
communities and young people reflect on their work at
these different levels and help them appreciate some of
their opportunities.
So we're going to take three different examples.
We're going to start with Engaging Youth Serving
Communities projects, which is the Rural Youth
Development piece I just talked about, and that's an
example of a place-based effort where young people, in
particular rural communities less than 10,000 people, were
engaged in working on community problems.
The second piece is looking at 4-H youth development
programs statewide.
I helped a group work through a study of the effectiveness
of our leadership programs and the impacts of our
leadership programs statewide.
So that really focuses on what are our practices that are
leading to young people.
So the first one focuses on place, the second one really on
practices, and the third one looking at the Youth as
Partners in Civic Leadership Conference, which is a
conference that brings young people together.
And that's really about building a community of young
people themselves that don't want to live in the same place
but are interacting together across the state.
So, starting with Engaging Youth Serving Communities,
again this is a Rural Youth Development project with
USDA funding, and the projects, essentially they were
seed grants given to communities.
We had $25,000 at the state level.
So $5,000 went to each of five communities to fund
community level action planning and implementation
of projects.
And they engage in a whole range of different projects, as
we'll see, across the community, but what brought them
together was young people were asked to convene a
community meeting to address an issue.
So one group, they were a group of counties that were
working on getting communities outside, getting people
more engaged in the outdoors and in healthy activities in
the community.
So they brought people together to talk about that issue
and identified an action, but young people were the ones
that were bringing those groups together.
So what we're going to do, and those in the room have a
handout, otherwise you can use the screen, we are going
to start mapping the Engaging Youth Serving Communities
project using this ripple effect mapping process.
And so if people have a pen, as we go through, there are
three levels to each of these, I would like you to put a star
by the impact that you find most compelling.
So if there's one thing on the sheet that you find the most
compelling impact, put a star by that.
And then draw a circle around something you'd want more
data about, that you'd want more information if you really
were going to tell the story about the public value
of this project.
And this is actually what we do when we're doing a ripple
effect mapping process.
We go through the process, and then, at the end, ask the
group itself to do some analysis.
What's most important of the things that are up here?
What are the things we need to learn more about?
And that's part of, then, leading that next level of asking
questions and thinking about moving forward.
So, at the individual level, the contributing, at the
contributing members of community level, how did EYSC
help create contributing community members?
A couple of these examples come from Oconto.
They were one of the EYSC projects, and, in the upper left
corner, there's a B by Oconto marsh viewing platform part
of getting young people out, getting families outside.
They decided there's a marsh in the community that was
an attractive place, but it wasn't easy for people to visit.
For many years there had been various ideas about
creating trails or other ways that people could visit the
marsh and they'd never gone anywhere.
Somehow when you brought young people, when young
people were bringing the groups together, all a sudden
things started moving forward.
People started working together and people started
investing in the project.
I believe on the last slide you see in the middle there,
that's the ribbon cutting for their platforms.
That was one project that young people contributed to.
The second project in Oconto with the C, sorry, the B from
Oconto stands for built.
That's a new piece of infrastructure in the community.
It's part of the built environment.
It's kind of connected to natural environment too.
So the B is to say that's that a built
environment contribution.
There's a C down in the lower left by the History by the
Bay virtual walking trail where young people worked with
the historical society to identify Oconto history and get
people to walk the community with their cell phones,
and when they got to a point they could open their app and
get a story about what happened on this place where you're
standing right now in history.
And so it was youth driven content, very place based in its
nature, and was designed to get people out interacting with
the community.
And then I also mentioned earlier the B at the top was the
young people in Florence designing those welcome signs
to the community and having input in some other signage
in the community.
So, as we're mapping, then the second question is, at the
second level, how do we build cross-sector collaboration,
and how are we helping people work together?
So, in the Oconto example, we mentioned that the young
people had to collaborate with the historical society,
and so there's, on the lower right, there's an
S for social capital.
We're building social capital, intergenerational connections
between young people and adults.
And so young people are out there contributing with
community adults.
The third level of mapping then would be to ask, at the
community level, are we promoting civility and inclusive
civic engagement and asking a group in what ways has the
community changed in a way that
we're acting together?
And just continue to follow that same arrow from youth
collaborating with community groups, then we would
continue to further social capital outcomes that youth and
adults continue to collaborate.
And there were lots of examples of those.
In Florence, the Department of Natural Resources coming
back to the young people and saying, |We need to reforest
some land, can you help us out with that project?|
And really starting to engage in continuing to work together
on projects that benefit the whole community.
And then, on the lower left, you follow the arrow,
that led to young people perceiving themselves as
contributing community members and also being
perceived by the community as contributing members.
So, if you put a star by the thing you think is the most
significant outcome, what's the most compelling impact of
those, and put a circle around what would you want to
know more about.
I'll say one thing about what that lower level C, when youth
perceive themselves as contributing community members,
when we asked the Florence youth that question they
actually said it a little bit more starkly, I guess.
|A young man said adults trust that we won't get out of
control; that we can be productive.|
So they're assuming that they're not seen as positive.
They're seen as like out of control and dangerous or
something and that we can actually productive
members of society.
And so perceiving themselves as community, as
responsible and contributing community members, but also
seeing that being reflected to them from
the whole community.
So, if I can ask, which of these did people put a circle
around that you want to learn more about?
Go ahead.
- Are you talking to me?
- Yeah, yeah.
- I would say, first of all, let's start with
the smaller C...
(inaudible)
- Okay, so you find that compelling?
- Yeah, that the youth, that this is their contribution.
I see it right there.
I think that the historical society, which in my community
the average age is perhaps 70.
- Yeah.
- That would be very interesting.
They're constantly trying to interact with the youth.
Let's just say I pick up on that idea, and it's
something I'm going to talk about--
- Let me reflect that back.
So it's, you're saying that for you the compelling impact
was that intergenerational connection with the historical
society, bringing the technology piece in, and that that's
something that you see as
meeting a strong community need.
Guess what the young people thought was
the most important?
That one in the lower level, being perceived by the
community as a contributing community member.
Over and over and over we hear that's the thing that young
people value the most as a result of these projects.
And so I'm going to keep on going.
So we'll come back around and we'll map a couple more of
these in a minute, but I just want to stop and say one
of the things that I find useful as we think about
these community projects is thinking about what's the role
that young people are taking.
And you think about that Engaging Youth Serving
Community Project, it was young people serving in multiple
roles in communities, and the pyramid shape on the left
talks about the three roles that young
people might play in a community project.
And at the bottom is the opportunity to contribute, to do
something meaningful, to take on a task, to do some
service learning, and that's the place that the most people
can be involved, that's why it's the biggest.
The second piece is young people need an opportunity to
provide some input, to have some self-determination.
Not just to be invited into doing a project but to helping
decide what their own projects are.
So having input and consultation into what's happening in
their community.
And then the third level is shared leadership.
So, can young people actually be helping to make
decisions about what's happening in communities or
happening in an organization or happening within
a 4-H club?
And I like these models because you can think about it on
a really small scale, even at a family level or a community
club level, or you can think about it as your
whole community.
Do we have opportunities for young people to contribute,
provide input, provide leadership?
Do those all exist in our community or not?
But ask folks, when you look at this, when you look at a
picture like that, where do you want to be?
What do you think? Like, what's your goal?
You think people want to say we want to have lots of
contribution or we want to go to the top and gets lots of
shared leadership?
So that picture pushes people to the top to say,
|We need to get young people involved in leadership.|
Well, yes we do, but if you bring young people into
leadership and there's not opportunity for input underneath
that, there's not opportunity for young people to come in
and contribute along the way,
what does that feel like?
That's that tokenistic opportunity where a young person
says, |"You're asking me to represent all those other young
"people I don't even know?
"I haven't had a chance to talk to them."
So you can just go there without the base.
And so I was in a training, actually a session at the Youth
as Partners in Civic Leadership Conference that we're
going to talk about a later, and they came up with this gear
image, which I like better
because it still says the same thing, but you need all three
of those turning.
If any one of those is freezing up, you're not going to be
moving forward.
So it still communicates the same idea, but I wanted to
share it partly because I like this, I walked around
the state with this triangle for years and I interacted
with some young people and they were like,
|No, that just makes us look at the top.|
So they helped create this, and so co-conceptualizing
that with young people, I think helps us learn as we go.
So the second example is I want to talk about,
I said we talked about the EYSC project, and the second one
I want to talk about is our 4-H youth leadership program.
What we did is we have about almost 13,000 4-H
members and program participants.
They were aged 12 to 18, basically.
We took a random sample and, believe it or not, 268 is
enough to give us a pretty good story.
And just to let you know what kind of leadership
opportunities they were having, you can see the largest
experience they had was being a 4-H club officer,
about two-thirds.
A lot of them had been involved in leadership training.
Better than a third involved in committees, and by which
they're working alongside adults doing that youth/adult
partnership, having that youth/adult
partnership experiences.
They've also had opportunities to teach and lead in
after-school programs.
About a quarter are part of teen leadership groups.
About 15% have been camp counselors, others involved in
state level teams, and then smaller groups, but still
significant, are those involved in community coalitions
alongside adults in the community.
Involved in teen courts, working on restorative justice,
or working with local government as a representative
of youth voice.
And for many of these young people, they had
multiple experiences.
They were involved in four or five of these items and often
for multiple years.
So some pretty significant experiences.
One of the things about, one of the elements of the 4-H
program that I haven't talked about is that opportunity for
long-term involvement and moving from the kind of
beginning contributor role to being a
leader and a teacher and increasing in leadership
over the years.
So, what we ask the young people, how much has 4-H
contributed to your ability to do a number of
different things?
And we actually, we asked them about skills, and they
said, "Yes, we've learned skills in 4-H, but we also learn
"skills a lot of other places."|
So those numbers weren't as strong.
We talk a lot about building life skills in 4-H youth
development, and we do communication skills, teamwork
skills, leadership skills.
Very, very important outcomes for our young people.
But the strongest things were in two areas,
and one is confidence.
So questions like, how much as 4-H helped you accept
responsibility for doing a job?
74% said a great deal or quite a bit.
And how much 4-H helped you feel like you can help a
team or group reach its goals?
And this idea stepping up into leadership when there's an
opportunity, we also did focus groups and interviewed
some young people.
And this is a young person from Buffalo County who is
serving on a community coalition.
And she said, "When I know no one else is willing to do it,
"it helps me make the decision to do it, and also knowing
"that there is impact on others."
So she's working on prevention issues.
She sees something in her community that needs dealing
with, and she says, |"I don't think anybody else is going to
"do this; I'm going to have to step up and do that."|
And that, to me, that comes from that authenticity and
doing real work.
She's accepting responsibility for something real in the
community that she sees as important, and that doesn't
come from fake situations.
The second piece that was really strong in our outcome,
and these were actually the highest outcomes of all, were
young people feeling more connected to their communities.
83% said 4-H was a significant part of them
feeling more connected.
More important to their communities, back to that young
person who said we feel like we're valued in
our communities.
So 77% said that 4-H has helped with that.
Contrast that with the Search Institute data that said 25%
or so felt like they were connected to their communities.
So, 4-H is helping to work against that.
And then, also, their motivation to make things better,
motivated to work with others to make things better
in their community.
I can quote an Iowa County 4-H ambassador who said,
|"You have to be involved to get anything out of it.
"We get things from the community, and we do things for
"the community."|
So they see themselves as a real part of a community.
They understand that other people are contributing to them
and that they're a piece of that.
So, again, if we go to map that, got to kind of map our 4-H
youth leadership programs and what are some of the key
elements that create contributing community members.
And I've said it before, but I think I would look at the one on
the right, that social capital, and I just put a few things on
here, we could do more.
But that youth/adult partnership practice is really,
really significant.
And it's because it leads to young people being interested
in and having interactions with adults and being able to
partner in an ongoing way with community adults.
And, in some cases, they might build the human capital of
understanding community issues and learning about
whether it's a drug abuse in their community or whether it's
an environmental issue in their
community, that then they're able to join with others who
are working on that, and that builds that social capital and
that connection.
And that's what leads to that last point that we found so
powerful in so many of our 4-H experiences, was that
increased community connectedness.
But I do want to stop and talk about the kind of practices
that lead to these kinds of outcomes because I think there
are a lot of different kinds of projects that young people
can involved in, and let's
think about the difference between two of them.
One is a 4-H community club might collect canned goods,
big pile of canned goods, and then go and drop it off at the
food pantry.
Helps out with people in need. It makes a contribution.
So that's a contribution.
Nothing wrong with that, but they haven't really interacted
with anybody.
They haven't really had an opportunity to build connections
with anybody in that process.
On the other hand, young people might work side by side
with adults in the communities on hunger issues.
They might be an multifaceted approach.
Part of it might be collecting food.
Part of it might be thinking about a community garden.
Part of it might be about giving, we've had 4-H groups help
at farmers' markets to help people use food stamp
vouchers to get fresh produce, for example.
They might explore policy around why is it we have people
who are hungry in our community?
How does that connect to the work that we're doing?
You still might collect canned goods and drop them off, but
then it kind of connects you in a different way to
the community.
So we've got to think about the kind of programming we
do, and being very intentional about creating
those opportunities.
And just to step back from this for a second, when we
have-- I've been involved in a group nationally called
The Contribution of 4-H Participation to the Development of
Social Capital within Communities,
which is a mouthful, but our intention is to measure the
impact of 4-H programs on social capital, on the
connectedness of young people to each other and to
adults in the community.
And so we've, and also to identify practices that contribute
to that work.
And so we've surveyed, we have a pilot survey that we've
implemented in California and Maryland, and it's some
interesting things, including a finding that the more service
people do, the more connected
they feel to others.
And particularly we're starting with some qualitative
information, in one way by doing these ripple effect maps
with a lot of different communities, to see the difference
between those 4-H groups and
community organizations that really connect with others
when they do their work and really work on issues that are
of interest to the broader community
We think it's really important that young people see
themselves and are seen by others as a piece of
community betterment.
So think back to that Florence example.
Very intentional about putting young people in that position
of being seen by others.
Co-leading work on issues of concerns to others.
So, instead of only identifying an issue that matters to the
group at hand, if we want to do a river clean-up, rather
than going out and doing it by ourselves, is there another
organization in the community that also cares about
the environment?
Maybe is also doing river clean-up work?
Can we work side by side together?
And then the young people have the experience, say, |I
met some people.
They're doing this again next month.
Maybe I'll go back and join them next month, or maybe
there's another opportunity to work together.|
So the difference between, could be the same project, but
who's engaged with it as you do it.
And then, so that's that bridging opportunity that we can
create intentionally, but so often I think we don't.
And then the last piece is having young people to have an
opportunity to organize and lead community efforts, and
that leads to that real bonding among themselves and with
others in the community.
So those are some key practices that we're starting
to uncover.
And, real quickly, the last example is that I shared
with this Youth as Partners in Civic Leadership Conference,
which is a weekend conference each November.
And last year we had 90 youth and 30 adults from 15
different teams.
Very geographically diverse.
Young people from Milwaukee, a major city, young people
from Indian reservations, from some of the smallest
communities in Wisconsin as well.
Very racially diverse.
Since 2004, we've had over 1,000 participants in
the conference.
And so these are young people who are already engaged in community leadership.
So in some ways, these are young people that are already
doing the work that we're looking for.
And so they come together and they have an opportunity
to attend this more advanced opportunity, build
connections with each other, go back home with some new
skills, some new ideas, and take action.
And I'll just say a couple of things.
We have a lot of opportunities for young people to take a
real active lead.
If you think about those gears in place, I think there are
roles for people to contribute in almost every way.
Young people are teaching each other about the work that they're doing.
It's not a chance for youth to come and learn from adults.
It's a chance for youth to come and teach each other about
their work.
And part of giving young people that role has really been
transformative on the work of the conference, and I think it
can be transformative on the work of a lot of our projects.
We create some open space within the conference for
people to do round tables or kind of offer their own very
informal discussions.
We've had a range of topics arise that have then led us to
talk about issues of gender and transgender young people,
issues of healthy dating relationships, issues of
immigrant youth.
These are things we didn't set out to talk about.
These are things that came because we created a space
for young people to talk about it.
So it really has changed the focus of the conference to
include things that are really important to the youth.
They also report that they've built a lot of skills through the
conference, particularly the strongest pieces each year is
that they exchange ideas and form friendships with young
people from diverse backgrounds around the state.
And they also say their teams are a great deal more likely
to initiate or follow through with work when they go
back home.
So, we asked young people, because we do a lot of things
at the conference, we asked our planning committee, what
is YPCL to you?
What is this conference to you?
And if you look at the statements up there, it's young
people and adults engaging in leadership.
It's organizations from all over meeting to connect and
share information.
It's organizers networking.
It's engaging throughout the year.
So the key words are there engagement, connection,
networking, young people and adults.
So if we map some of those outcomes, then these are
some of the things that happened at the conference.
That we have diverse youth sharing their cultural
perspectives, whether that's from immigrant perspective or
Native American youth or whatever it might be, that they're
sharing their experiences with others in the conference
and that that leads then to the conference taking on new
issues and topics, like I said.
So that's a real cultural shift for us to even take those
issues on.
If we look up at the top right where the social capital piece
of youth connecting with other leaders and issues around
the state, young people learn about what other young
people are doing, one example is from going back to our
Florence story again.
The young people from Florence had built a team, an
active team leadership, and they came to the Youth as
Partners in Civic Leadership Conference.
They met the group called Fighting Against Corporate
Tobacco, super energetic work around decreasing smoking
in public spaces.
This goes back a while.
That issue is now, they won the day on that.
But the Florence kids then, two of them joined the state
team, the state fact board, and they said they were the
only rural youth.
The other kids were all from Milwaukee and Madison, and
then two kids from way up north in Florence had to drive all
the way down to Madison for these meetings.
But they had been brought into contact with an issue that
they weren't working on, but they got engaged, and I think
it's because of the community of youth that was built there.
And so a couple of things that's led to.
One is that I think that there's emerging a stronger network
of organizations and young people via the conference.
Just as a personal aside, I ran into a former YPCL member
at the grocery store last week.
She currently is on the staff of a US Senator.
She said, |"Oh, I run into people from YPCL all the time."|
She said a young man who was Lincoln County
representative now works for a major national insurance
company, is now her political action committee connection.
So doing corporate donations to the senator that she
works for.
So they're still connected now, or they've reconnected now,
and they were at YPCL together.
So those networks are personal, but I also think the
organizations have continued to work together, and we can
talk more about that if we want.
The other piece I'd say. down in the lower left corner, is not
only has that conference taken on additional topics, at a
state 4-H event last year we invited a group of youth
leaders from the YPCL conference to come to our
conference, share leadership with us or join our leadership
group, and basically be consultants about how can we be
a more inclusive conference.
And so that network has come and helped us to, I think,
change the culture of our conference, and the request from
our youth leaders after that conference was could we get
some training on how to more effectively intervene when
we see discrimination happening.
How do you do that in a way that keeps relationships open?
How do you do that in a way that doesn't
shut things down?
That's a really high level communication skill, and they're
asking for that as a result of this experience.
So I think the opportunity for, one, experience if we can
share it across systems to change cultures in
other experiences.
I forgot to ask you what you've been circling and starring.
So real quick, we don't have time to talk, but is there
something up here that you've got a star on or a circle
around that you would want to learn more about or you
think is the most significant impact?
Or maybe you haven't been doing your homework.
- (inaudible)
- Okay.
- (inaudible)
- Right, it's that getting young people who are involved in local
work to get connected with that state level policy work and
take it to another level then.
So you see that as a really significant outcome.
And I think those young people from Florence were
certainly excited about that opportunity and other
stuff as well.
Yeah, Frank.
- I put that you can connect with other... (inaudible)
- Okay, so young people are bridging into other issues.
Maybe becoming aware.
I mean, an example we had, a group from a Native
American community sees some healthy relationship work
that was going on in one community, like how to promote
healthy dating relationships so people were
going into things with open eyes, taking good
care of themselves.
And they said we really need that in our community, and
we didn't realize that young people could do that work.
So, yeah, exactly.
That's a really significant outcome.
So I was going to put all these together into one map.
I thought when I started we'll just do it all on one, and it
was a big old mess.
So I just pulled out the community level impact.
I think that's the hardest thing for us to talk about.
We're often able to talk about the impact on young people;
we're able to talk about work with organizations.
Sometimes the hardest thing is for us to think about that
community level impact.
I think these are the kinds of outcomes we can anticipate if
we do intentional community youth development work.
The challenge is how do we understand that change?
How do we help our young people understand that change?
How do we talk about it ourselves?
So, those are from all of the cases that we mapped,
the outcomes.
And a couple things you'll notice, I think, and this is
consistent with some of our national work, is that
developing that bonding social capital is a critical first step
to building trust.
So people need to know each other.
People need to work together.
They need opportunities to build trust and the capacity to
continue to work together.
And that is the, we've discovered looking at all of these
projects, that that's the place we have to start because
once we've got those networks and relationships in place
we can move forward into other things,
but that comes first.
The second piece, and I already talked about this, was that
opportunity to bridge youth to other community leaders or
youth to young people who are from a different situation,
working on different issues, whatever it might be.
So you think about our Engaging Youth Serving
Communities projects bridging youth and adult
partnerships together, the YPCL conference bridging
young people from different communities together.
And then I also mentioned that this last one, that youth
perceive themselves as contributing community members
and that, maybe more importantly, the community sees
them that way is often the thing that young people
gravitate to as the most important of their outcomes.
So that was my attempt to take a look backwards at some
of the programming we've been doing and learning some
lessons, and I wanted to spend the last few minutes that
we have to talk about some things going forward.
There's a team that we've started, an interdisciplinary
team, called Engaging Young People to Sustain
Communities, Families, and Farms.
Sorry, Engaging Young People to Sustain Communities,
Families, and Farms.
It's a mouthful, but we've really tried to think about there
are some of these things that we're looking at.
What I was doing was starting with our youth-driven
program and thinking about how does it relate
to communities.
But if we really think about what our communities need,
I think it forces us to think more broadly and to engage
outside of youth development.
And so we've started to, we've built this framework about
thinking about do we have ways in Extension to connect
three of our audiences: families with young children, young
people themselves, school age young people, and then
young adults, our 20- to 29-year-olds or even a little older
into their 30s who are often not given opportunities to take
leadership in communities.
A lot of communities are struggling to retain young people,
they're struggling to engage young people, and we think
that if we can connect those young people to their
communities, it'll help with that process.
And then, what are we engaging them in?
Well, we're engaging them in activities that are
place-based, and it will help connect them to the assets
of their community, build pride, and positive perceptions
of their community.
Opportunities to empower diverse community leadership.
So just thinking about young people as a piece of that
diverse leadership that is often excluding.
What are some other practices that we can learn from
others and share across our system?
I think we're really well placed to do that.
And then, also, how do we build skills so that young people
have jobs, and how do we build entrepreneurial
opportunities in communities?
And if young people and young adults are engaged in
those things, our communities are going to be more
attractive in sustainable places.
Young people who are looking for a place to live, young
families looking for a place to live are going to gravitate to
places that have that kind of energy that include youth.
And so we've done research review and found that when,
and these just reiterate a lot of what we found in looking at
our youth programs, is that when young people are
engaged, it enhances social capital, their own social
capital, and that they also benefit when the community has
strong social capital.
So, again, going back to that strong community, if there's
good strong social capital and community, I could tap into
that and benefit from that even if I'm a newcomer
to the community.
This civic engagement among all groups promotes a sense
of community and increases our capacity to
address issues.
That we need to think about placed-based approaches,
and that's one of our strong points in Extension.
We are spread throughout the state.
We represent the university in every corner of Wisconsin.
We are on the ground to address those local complexities
in a really place-based and grounded way.
And that, just like I said, that if that economic and
community development is promoted, if youth perceive that
community as a healthy and safe place for a family.
So we're engaged in a number of research projects, and
you can learn more about them later in the conference.
One is a project looking at some census data, sort of
looking across Wisconsin to say, what are the communities
that are successful that are retaining young people?
Where are young people actually living?
Or who's been managing to grow their young adult
population in the last 20 years?
Once we identify what those community outliers are, we're
going to go and try to ask the why questions and do some
case studies of those projects.
I think we can learn a lot from communities and engage
some new communities in helping us understand what's
going right in communities.
There's a social network project collecting data in Dane,
Marquette, and Iron Counties right now, looking at the
relationship between young people and adults, and as we
work are we actually strengthening the bonds between
young people.
And one of the groups that we're working with in that study
is a Youth First Impressions project that's being led by
Neil Klemme in Iron County and his colleagues that
we have, they're also working in Marquette and
Florence County to bring young people into community
development by visiting a neighboring community and
giving some feedback into how well it meets their needs,
how an outsider's eye, kind of a secret shopper view toward
community development.
And so we're on the midst of all these projects and we're
excited about them going forward and I think we're going to
learn a lot more about the kind of impact.
But I think these are, we're moving from, I think, casting a
really wide net and trying to really understand what
practices are positive toward really trying to capture some
harder and more substantial data about our outcomes.
And here's just a picture to get, you thought that web was
messy, the ripple effect was messy, this is a picture of the
Iron County Youth Council First Impressions young people
and the adults that they've been working with or might be
working with in the community.
And so the purple squares are adults or the dark blue
squares are adults and the lighter squares are
young people.
And the thick lines show highly valued relationships for
getting advice and information from each other, and the
thin lines are less valued relationships.
But you can see that the young people are connected to
each other to a great extent, and there are a significant
number of adults that are strongly connected to those
young people as well.
So this was the pretest.
Pretty strong already, but after the project we're going to
be looking and seeing if those relationships are richer.
Perhaps it's not all the youth on one side and all the adults
on the other side, but that the relationships are a little more
complex and that maybe there are more people
involved in them.
So I think this is a way for us just to be intentional about
our outcomes about networking.
And if we think about the difference between those isolated
kind of projects and the ones that really connect people
across diversity, I think this will help us document whether
we're doing those things and give us opportunities to work.
We need to figure out how to connect those people way up
in the corner.
They're not connected.
So I'll close with this image,
which comes from Mary Emory and Camelia Flora
about spiraling up in communities,
and they're the ones who helped to develop
that community capital image that we started with.
And so if you start at the bottom, the process is young
people developing that bonding social capital, working
together to develop some trust so they can move forward.
So you think about those kids in Florence getting together
and doing that work.
Young people identifying projects that impact the
common good.
Let's do something that's bigger than just us.
And then starting to develop youth developing partnership
with other groups to complete that project, and so they are
then building that social capital network.
And then the effect of that is that the community project
builds that bridging social capital between the youth group
and community organizations.
And the final thing is that youth and adults develop new
ways of thinking about the importance of youth as a
community resource.
And then that is an outcome that then changes the culture
of the community.
And then how is that, then the reason it's spiraling up
because then they're positioned to start again but from a
place where they already have stronger relationships and
they can go higher in their work.
And so I think, to me, this says, this is a little bit of
a guide post to say this is the kind of work we should be
doing in Extension.
We need to start small.
We have those personal relationships, but we need to think
about where we're going and thinking about how do we
intentionally make these community development efforts.
And I would just go back to my last experience with
anybody from Florence.
I ran into two young people from Florence who were with a
county board member at a spring event at the capitol.
They were going to visit a legislator to talk
about Extension.
And I said, |"So what's going on in Florence? How are things going?"
Now, granted, this is 10 years later, so these high school
students that I was talking to were probably six years
old at the time all this got started.
And they said, "Oh, the county board member said,
|"'We're really excited about the fab lab at the school.'"|
There's a fab lab, which is a designed studio for students
to use, but it's also open to the community.
And there's some businesses that are really excited about
using this in their work.
And so the school is at the heart of a community
development effort, and the students are involved in that.
And the students were hustling back home to do their
teacher appreciation week, which I think we have
everywhere, but in my school, my kid's school, it's
organized by parents.
These kids had a whole theme set up, and they were doing
this whole involved process to appreciate their teachers,
including cooking food and having costume days and all
this stuff.
I though there's something still going on in Florence that's
rooted in that school and some of that work.
And so I think as Extension thinks about itself moving
forward in changing times, we live in a state that's
incredibly racially segregated.
We have communities that are struggling to
find sustainability.
Our economies are changing.
I think our work is to dig in locally to places
and think about how do we help our citizens and our
young people and everyone in our communities engage
in that spiraling up process, and I think that's what
creates public value for a school, for a public
education program, like Extension, in a democracy,
and I think that that's a unique niche that we're
placed to do because of our situation in every community
in Wisconsin.
So, to me, that's our challenge going forward, to be very
intentional about how we bring young people into our
community development, and I think we'll all be a lot better
off if we do that.
I won't read the long quote from John Dewey, but that's a
hundred years old and it still applies.
We can go back to that later.
Basically, he's talking about how democracy is not, doesn't
depend on external authority but that everybody needs to
find ways to develop a common interest, that we need to
learn how to live together, and that if we can think about
our own actions in terms of others, that we'll be able to
break down barriers of class race and national territory
which keep us from moving together.
And I think if he were writing this today and he were
looking at the work we were doing, he would include the
barriers of age in that.
He wrote about schools being laboratories of democracy.
I think Extension is really bringing young people into the
practice of democracy.
And those are some references we used today, and thanks
very much.
(applause)