University Place Building a Civil Society Seminar Carole MacNeil, "Youth Activism and Civic Engagement" 7/6/2010  UP 454   cc >> Jeanan Yasiri: Through the nonprofit sector, this is a Communiversity session that's offered through the UW Center for Nonprofits, within the School of Human Ecology here at the University of Wisconsin. I'm Jeanan Yasiri, and I have the privilege of serving as the executive director of the center. As we begin today, I'd like to extend thanks to our partners who support our series. UW Division of Continuing Studies, the Oscar Rennebohm Foundation, the Alliant Energy Foundation, the Morgridge Center for Public Service Challenge Grant, and the Brittingham Fund. Additionally, we'd like to thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University Place crew, for taping tonight's lecture. Today I'm very pleased to introduce our special guest, Carole MacNeil. Carole is the founder and principal of MacNeil and Associates Consulting in Denver, Colorado, where her work focuses on organizational development, leadership coaching and training, and team building, as well as group dynamics. She has led organizational and community change initiatives throughout the US as well as abroad to make the places that we live and work more equitable, inclusive, effective, and vibrant. Carole co-founded the award-winning organization Project Yes, Youth Envisioning Social Change, and served as its executive director for ten years. She's served as the state-wide director for the University of California's 4H Youth Development program, leading an organization of 130,000 youth and 20,000 adult volunteers. 

She's served as the national director of the 4H Youth Governance Initiative in which she designed and led a national organizational change effort to support youth leadership and decision making in organizations and communities throughout the US. Carole earned her Master's degree from Harvard University, her PhD at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a certificate in Nonprofit Leadership from the University of Colorado at Denver. Tonight Carole joins us and will share some of the knowledge she's developed through her work in youth civic engagement and its role in building a civil society. Please join me in welcoming Carole MacNeil. (applause)  >> Carole MacNeil: Thank you, Jeanan, I'm really happy to be here. Tonight we're going to talk about the role and the power of young people in building civil society. I'd like to explore together with you how young people can engage and actually already are engaging as co-creators and partners in civil society. They are not waiting to inherit a civil society that somebody else is creating. That is, that adults are creating. In communities all over this country and actually all over the world, young people are already building civil society, making community change happen, learning leadership, and actually leading change initiatives. 

And so what I'd like to do tonight is really explore the value and the power of youth civic engagement by really looking at some specific examples and sharing with you some stories. There's some really cool stuff happening out there and I just want to share that with you, and I think you'll start to see, if you don't already have an appreciation for what young people can do in building civil society, you'll begin to see some really powerful examples of what's happening. So before I start, you've had a number of different speakers over the last few weeks and I would suspect that most of those speakers, if not all of them, have defined "civil society" somewhat differently. And it's a pretty amorphous term. It can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It gets defined in a lot of ways and actually gets defined in ways that sometimes contradict each other. As does "civic engagement" and even the term "youth," can be contradictory. So let me just tell you how I define it and you'll know what working definition I'm using and we'll go from there. So when I'm talking about civil society, I am thinking really broadly about the concept. I'm thinking about nonprofits and I'm thinking about NGOs, non-governmental organizations. 

But I'm also thinking about those more informal networks and associations. So, it's really, in my mind, a broad term that includes collectives that are working toward the common good. Similarly, civic engagement, it's interesting. A lot of the conversations around civic engagement tend to focus on political involvement, and that's not my definition of civic engagement. My definition includes those things, more formal political engagement, voting, campaigning, working on different kinds of elective issues, but I'm also looking at really any individual and collective actions that are working towards the betterment of our communities or the society. So it could be related to government, but it could just as easily be a park cleanup campaign, it could be a neighborhood watch movement, it could be serving on a nonprofit board of directors. Those are all forms, in my mind, of civic engagement. Ways that people come together for the common good. So "youth." Youth is an interesting one. You'd think you've just got to throw out a number, right? Anybody under 18. 

Well, maybe it's under 21, or maybe it's under 25. Or maybe it's under 30. And the truth is, it's all of those things. And it depends on who you talk to and what the context is. A lot of the youth organizations that I have worked in, youth means kind of up through high school age. In other organizations, youth can be anybody that is through college age. In a lot of nonprofit organizations, when nonprofits are talking about youth on boards of directors, they often will use either 25, 26, or 30 as kind of the cut-off point. So that's the year that you magically go from youth to adult, I guess. But really, it's an arbitrary term that's just used to help us think about the work that we're doing. When I'm talking about youth, examples that I'm going to use are actually mostly up through high school. 

So according to my definition, there probably aren't any youth in this room. In other definitions, there are mostly youth in this room. So that's the definition that I'm using. The exception is, I'm going to share with you towards the end a project that I'm working on right now in Kenya, and youth has a very different meaning in Kenya, so I'll get to that in a little bit. So, what I want to do with you is kind of go through a few reasons that I get passionate about youth civic engagement, and I will warn you, I am passionate about the topic, and I'll try to get you out of here before 11:00 tonight. But I want to go through a few reasons with you that I think we should be thinking about this and talking about this as a society, and then use some examples of organizations that I've worked with and projects that I've worked with to highlight those benefits. So the first one is, youth civic engagement is good for youth. Well, that's kind of the "no duh" benefit. It's pretty self-evident, but I do want to say that although it seems like it would be self-evident, some people still don't support the idea of youth civic engagement. And we do have a society that sometimes can marginalize young people and think that what we're doing is getting young people ready to be adults, and that that's really what our role is as society. 

Instead of seeing young people as being already resources to the community and active civic partners in the community. What we know from the research, and there has been a significant body of research over the last ten or more years, to show that there are tremendous benefits to the young people who participate in civic engagement activities. They learn things like communication skills, problem solving skills, decision making skills. They develop a sense of belonging, a stronger sense of identity. And some of the research also indicates that there is, when young people get engaged in some kind of civic activities or in youth-adult partnerships and decision making roles in organizations and communities, that it increases the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, and it increase the likelihood that they will avoid certain risk behaviors like drug use, or teen pregnancy. There actually was some research that came out not too long ago from the CIRCLE Foundation. You may know of CIRCLE. CIRCLE stands for the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. So it's a great resource for any of you that are interested in this topic of civic engagement. There's some wonderful resources there. 

The research that just came out by Dellan and Mora said that, "civically engaged teenagers make greater scholastic progress during high school and subsequently acquire higher levels of education than their otherwise similar peers." And this is kind of interesting because we knew already that higher levels of education tend to correlate with higher participation levels in civic engagement. We didn't know that the opposite, the inverse, was also true. That when you are engaged civically, you're more likely to attain higher levels of education. So that was kind of an interesting finding, I think. We've got these benefits. Well, what does that look like when you actually talk about youth civic engagement on the ground, in process? I'm going to begin with an example of an organization I know just a little bit about, a community-based organization called Project Yes. And as Jeanan mentioned, I was the co-founder of this organization back in 1991 and served as the executive director for ten years. So Project Yes was, is still, an organization that brings together groups of young people to form small groups and to think about, what are the issues that are important to us? What are the issues that personally affect our lives, and what do we want to do about them? And it's a youth arts service action organization, so it uses the arts as a tool for social change and for social commentary. And what the groups do is, they take some time to understand the issue and the ways that they are already experts in the issue. Not very often do young people get acknowledged as being experts, and so this organization says, you are already experts in the issues that impact your lives. 

And then it took them through a process of looking at, what are the perspectives that are missing? What do we know, but what don't we know, and what are the perspectives that are missing? And so they would invite those other perspectives in to more fully explore the issue. Meanwhile, they were leaning a particular artistic medium and developing skills in that artistic medium. And then they would identify and develop a project that they wanted to create around the issue that they had decided on. When they completed that artistic project, I'm going to show you some examples of what I mean by artistic projects, there was also an outreach plan, and so it wasn't just that they would create the art. It was also that they would do something with that art, that they would get the message out there and make some change happen in their community. One of the interesting things, or one of the powerful, inspiring things for me about working with this organization was that it worked with young people who were marginalized in a lot of ways. They were, perhaps, teen moms or they were perhaps in trouble with the law, or they had been involved in gangs or they had substance abuse issues, or they were on the verge of being kicked out of school, or whatever. Just a number of different challenges that they faced. And they were kids that others commonly referred to as "at-risk" youth, but we called them "at-promise" youth, and thought of them as community leaders and we held very high expectations, and they did some pretty amazing things, which I'm excited to share with you. So, why arts? Why would we do arts as part of civic engagement? Well, "arts education is an important way to nurture civil society, for the arts are its very soul and the source of that creative imagination indispensable to both culture and democracy." So there's a link there that is sometimes not understood between the arts and civil society, the arts and civic engagement. 

But I can tell you from ten years of doing the work that it's a very powerful link and that it is a way to engage in society that can make different kinds of change happen because it can inspire new ways of thinking about the issues. So let me share with you some stories and some examples. The first one was a group of middle school students. And they decided when they came together that their issue was going to be recycling and the environment. They were very concerned about the environment and decided that that's what they wanted to do. And they used their artistic medium, graphic arts, and worked with a professional graphic artist to create a series of educational posters that were focused on the importance of recycling and why we should care for the environment, and I think they did ten or twelve different posters. Their outreach project was a couple of things. They did some community forums and they traveled their posters around Denver, went to the state capitol, went to different schools, went to school district offices, and they led discussions around the importance of recycling, and they started a recycling program in their school. But one of the things that was, I think was pretty cool about the project was that they decided that one of the ways that they could get the word out was by blowing up one of their posters into a, I don't know, 4 foot by 5 foot, maybe, the size of a bus shelter. You know the advertising posters on bus shelters? And so they blew one of the posters up, they selected which one, and then it landed in a number of bus shelters across the Denver area. 

And they particularly chose bus shelters that were close to schools, because they really wanted to reach their peers and they figured their peers would be hanging out at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, and they might look at the poster and realize that the poster was done by their peers and they might listen more. So let me show you some of their posters. These are a little, might be a little distorted because of the PowerPoint. "Every glass bottle recycled can save enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for four hours." "I want you to recycle." I put that one in because it seemed that the 4th of July holiday, it seemed like a good one. "Think about this: Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial aircraft fleet every three months." "Simple! Home mechanics dispose of enough waste motor oil to repeat the Exxon Valdez every 2 1/2 weeks." I wonder what those young people who are getting less young now, I wonder what they would be saying about the gulf oil crisis. "It's up to you to recycle. Think about this: every ton of paper that gets recycled keeps 60 pounds of pollutants out of our air. Please recycle." And this is an example of the bus shelter. That was the poster they chose to be blown up to bus shelter size. So that was up for, I think a couple of months in various bus shelters throughout Denver. 

Okay, the second example that I want to share with you was a peace park. And this was a group of middle school and high school students, and actually as the project went on it kept expanding and it wound up being elementary, middle, and high school students all the way across. But it was a mobile home park that had no safe place for children to play. And, you know, there was a place that used to be a park, but it was a little pathetic. It was like one broken swing and patch of dirt, and everything was dilapidated. And it wasn't safe because it was a contested space, so the older kids in the community kind of used it as a way to mark turf, so the little kids didn't have anywhere to play. And the community was pretty fragmented, frankly, and so this group from that community, this group of mostly middle school, sort of older middle school and younger high school students, decided they were going to recreate this park and make it a peace park, which means to them, they wanted a place that highlighted the importance of nonviolence and that gave the young people a safe place to play. And so they worked with professional landscape designers, they worked with professional muralists, they worked with sculptors, and wound up creating this park that was actually really fun. It was, the whole community wound up coming out to build this park and just one interesting result from it is that some of the young people who had been, well, they had been the ones that had been using the spaces to kind of mark turf, and they were a little resistant to getting involved initially. I remember one meeting where a couple of them put their fists through walls, and I thought, this project is going to be the first project that we don't succeed at. 

But in fact, they became the most powerful community leaders. And they became the staunch defenders of that space once it was built. So I'll show you a few of the public pieces, the public art pieces that were created there. So they did some sculptures, this was one of a set of entrance markers to the park. They did some sculpted furniture. And a large tile mural with "peace is possible" in the middle and then different tiles that the young people that they brought in, a lot of the elementary school had done these tiles and middle school, as well, had done these tiles expressing their hopes for peace. Let me just move on to the third example. The third example was a bus art project, and actually this was a little different. We didn't bring together a group and say, go through the process, what are the issues that affect you, and having them choose an issue. The group sort of coalesced and formed itself around an issue and that was the issue of violence, specifically gun violence. 

This was right after the Columbine shootings. And for anyone who, well, it was devastating for a lot of us throughout the country, and particularly, I think, educators, but in Colorado it was really a hard time for us. And these young people felt really powerless about that and frightened about what had happened, and wanted to do something about that. And so they took the power back and decided, we're going to do some public education around gun violence. And they studied the issue and brought in people to talk to them and their artistic medium was large-scale mural and graphic arts. And so what they did was, created two pieces for the sides of public buses. They decided, we don't want this to just be up in schools, we want everybody to see this. This is too important. So they put it on the sides of public buses and it traveled throughout the county for a month or so. One of the posters, there were two different posters, one said "stop the violence, let's be friends." And then the statistic, "every two hours a child or teen is killed by gunfire." And the other one said, "stop the violence, peace is possible." And again, with that same statistic, "every two hours a child or teen is killed by gunfire." And they did also do some community forums and some discussions on the topic, but it was very powerful to see those public buses go by with young people that were saying, no, we don't accept this and we can do something about this. 

The last project I want to share with you was a video project and this project was in a school, a high school, that was called "the dumping ground school" and the "last chance high school." And the kids called it that, but sadly, a lot of the teachers called it that, as well. That's not to say there weren't a lot of dedicated teachers there, because there were, but it was a school that had a reputation. And it was a school that kids went to when they'd been kicked out of their school and they had really no other option left. And so the kids that were there were facing tremendous challenges and some of them had been in trouble with the law, some of them were teen moms, some of them were dealing with substance abuse issues or gang issues. They were trying to get out of a gang or trying to avoid getting in a gang, or what have you. And when we started this project, I remember sort of the tension that we see sometimes with the civic engagement. I remember some of the teachers coming and saying, well, you know, this is an after school project and if you don't either pay these kids or offer them credit, they're not going to show up, because they don't commit to anything. And that was almost an exact quote of the language that we heard. We said, no, we don't do that. We don't pay, we don't offer credit. 

Just let's see. So this group came together and we said, we're going to be meeting for 12 to 16 weeks, once a week, after school for three hours. And we expect perfect attendance. And this was a group that didn't have perfect attendance really at anything in their life. But what happened was, they began immediately to see that this was about the issues that they cared about, that they got to choose the issue, and they saw that, here's an opportunity to have power, to have leadership, to have voice, and to use it towards something that matters to us. And guess what. They showed up, every week, and they kept coming back. And when the project reached a snafu, which I'm going to tell you about in just a second, and hit some difficult time, going from a 12 week project to a 6 month project. And it went into the summer and into their summer vacation, and they still showed up and finished this project. So let me tell you about what the snafu was. 

This group had been affected by a number of different issues. They had a lot to choose from in terms of what issues they wanted to work on. But there were a couple of teen moms in the group, and there were a couple people that had been affected by AIDS. This was in the mid-90s and AIDS was still really something to panic about. And so they felt really strongly that they wanted to do something about what they termed "the negative consequences of teen sexual behaviors." So that was going to be their topic. And great, that's what we started working on, they did the research, and they began learning video. The artistic medium was video and so they were using professional video production equipment, so they were learning that. And meanwhile, the school had said, great, you're going to do a project, how nice, and they kind of - whatever. And the school board, through whom we were funneling the funding for this, said, "Great, no problem, you're going to do a project, great." Well, that was until they heard the topic that the young people had chosen and then suddenly it was, "They're going to talk about sex?" Like, "Oh, no." And it was a pretty conservative school board at that time, and they said, "Uh-uh, no way." And said, "You've got to choose, if you want this money to do this project, you're going to have to choose another topic." So, we went back to the group. We said, okay guys, here's the deal, here's what the school board has said. 

If you want the money, you have to choose another topic. And I will never forget the look on their faces when we told them that. It was like, ugh. We've just gotten screwed over by the adults again. Finally we were going to have a voice, and yet, no. What were we thinking, this is never going to happen. It was kind of one of those defining moments where my co-leader and I said, we have to handle this right or we lose this forever. So we said, "Look, here's the continuum of options." At one end is, we say, okay, school board, you don't want us to do this topic, we won't do this topic, so what do you want us to do? And that's what we'll do. At the other end of the continuum would be to say, we don't care what you think and we're going to do it anyway. And the consequences of that is that we'd lose the funding, so it's going to take longer because we're going to have to go out and raise some money to make this thing happen. 

But that's another option. That is a viable option on the continuum. And then we said, but what are some other options that are somewhere in between those two extremes? And I will tell you, I've been working with activists for most of my life, and this was probably the most brilliant, strategic action that I have ever seen, bar none. So this group realized, okay, we still can make this happen. They said, let's find out what it is that the school board is so afraid of. Let's go talk to them. And they did. And they found out that the school board was afraid of them promoting sex. They were afraid really, it came down to one sentence that the school board was afraid of. "If you're going to have sex, use a condom." That's what they were afraid of, because they saw that as promoting teen sexual behavior. 

And so they understood that. Then the next thing they said was, "But we know that sex is already taught." Sex education, not sex. Sex education is already taught in the schools, and it's already being taught in middle school, because that was the audience that they wanted to reach. These high schoolers said, it doesn't do any good to wait until high school age. We've got to reach our younger peers. So they really wanted to reach the middle school students. So it was like, that's already being taught. So, let's find out how it's already being taught and let's see how the official curriculum writers got away with it when we can't get away with it. So they went and they met with the district health curriculum coordinator and they found out about language that was deemed appropriate for middle school, and they found out about the content that was taught. And then here's what they did that was, I thought, so brilliant. 

I mean, the other things were brilliant, too, but this was very smart. So, they said, okay, we can't say, "if you're going to have sex, use a condom." But we can give statistics, that's one thing. Because you can't refute statistics, and these are just the facts, and all we're going to do is say the facts. And then, we're going to do a documentary style video. And so instead of us telling the story and giving the message, we're going to go find people who have been impacted by these issues, and we're going to ask them to tell the stories and we're going to ask them to say what they would tell middle schoolers. And we're going to have them give advice. And guess what. The advice that those people gave was, can you guess? "If you're going to have sex, use a condom," right? But they also gave the advice, the only way to avoid AIDS is abstinence. The only real way to avoid AIDS is abstinence. And the only real way to avoid teen pregnancy is abstinence. 

But if you're going to have sex, use a condom. And so they got the message out there and that was what they really wanted to achieve. And not only did it fly past the school board, the video wound up being officially adopted as part of the district's health curriculum. So it went from the school board saying, "Uh-uh, can't do it," to it being sanctioned. And it was still what they wanted to do. It also wound up being distributed nationally. It was picked up by a health curriculum company and was distributed nationally. It was called "It Can Happen To You, a video about teen pregnancy and AIDS, produced by teens for teens." And it won some awards and the young people that went through this process learned some amazing things that benefit young people, but they also made a huge difference for their peers. And I have the video here, so if we have some time at the end and anyone wants to see a little clip from it, just a short clip, we can do that. It was a pretty amazing experience for all of us to go through that. 

I think what makes a project like that or other projects that are happening all over the place successful is a couple of things, actually. One is that, in Project Yes, at least, there was a compelling need. It wasn't an artificial need, it wasn't a mock situation. It was a real need in a real community and they were doing something real about it. There was nothing mock or simulated about this at all. And they were set up for success by learning the skills and knowledge that they needed, including artistic skills, including what I would call some foundational skills. Writing and research skills, and public speaking skills. As well as strategic thinking and strategic planning and activism kinds of skills. And they were in an environment that saw them as leaders. Not as future leaders, but as leaders right now, and for many of these young people, it was the first time that anyone had said, "You're a community leader." And that very high expectation allowed them to step into their potential. 

Let me just pause for a second to see. Is there any question about the Project Yes or this idea of young people benefiting from...  Yeah. >> How do you measure the impact of a project like this? >> Good question. >> Yasiri: Can you repeat the question, Carole? >> Sorry, yes, thank you for the reminder. The question was, how do you measure impact of a project like this? And I think impact is a really tough thing to measure because you're talking about, what are the long-term ramifications? How many kids did not have sex because they saw the video? Well, how do we measure that? That part is really challenging. But we can measure are some outcomes to the young people who participated. We can find out things about what they've learned specifically, knowledge gain or skill gain, and one of the things that I always have found interesting is try to look at attitudinal change, to see how is, because for me that's what gets me excited. It's not that kids came away knowing that, you know, video editing requires A, B, or C. But it's that they came away saying, "Ooh, I can make a difference, what next? What am I going to do next?" And so you can measure those kinds of self-assessments and self-beliefs and attitudes about, who am I in my community and what role do I play? And for me, that's a really exciting thing to try to get at. 

I will also say that adults who tend to, who are involved in these kind of projects also wind up changing in terms of attitudes and beliefs, too. They suddenly see, oh wow, these young people - and this happened in this project. Actually, it happened in all of the projects, where adults would always, some adults would say, "I never knew that these young people could be such leaders. I never knew that they could make such a difference. I never knew that they cared so much about their community." And it was an awakening for the adults as well. So, thank you, good question. All right, let me move to my second case study. This is, by the way, the forum, one of the community forums that they did with the discussion about the negative consequences of teen sexual behavior. And if anybody's interested in Project Yes, the website is project-yes.org. Okay. 

Youth civic engagement is good for organizations and communities. So, we've got the youth part, we've seen how it benefits youth. But it also, the work that they're doing benefits the organizations and the communities in which they're doing the work. So, what we know from research that has been going on is that when youth are engaged in really authentic ways in communities and organizations, that they change the organization or community. They do stuff. they accomplish things. And one of the byproducts is that they can make the organization more appealing. They bring in energy and expertise. I often, when I work with nonprofit boards of organizations that are youth oriented organizations, I look around and I say, "Where are the young people?" And I talk to them about why young people should be on the board. I was just working with a nonprofit not too long ago who said, "Yeah, we decided we want to bring young people in because we know it would be really good, it would be a chance to mentor them, and we think it would be a really good experience for them." And I said, "True, but you haven't even begun to scratch the surface of why this is a good idea." Because what happens is, when young people join boards, and I've seen this time and time again, is that they bring an expertise to the table that the other board members don't have. 

The adult members have aged out of the program long ago, and don't have the close tie, and don't have the perspective, and don't have the real hands-on knowledge that a young person does. They bring energy, they bring passion, and all kinds of other things to the table, too. So it's a win for the adults and the organization as well as it is for the young people. I remember working with a foundation, a fundraising foundation that fundraised for a youth organization. And the head of the foundation had never really involved youth in fundraising efforts before. And I said, why don't you take one of the young people from the program on your next donor call? And he said, "I haven't really done that before, I don't know how we'd do that." I said, "It's easy, you ask them, do you want to go?" It's not really too hard. So I said, ask a young person. So he did, went and asked, "do you want to go?" They did. He came back and he said, "I am never going on another donor call without a young person again." And the reason was because this particular donor had absolutely no interest in talking to him. The donor was completely interested in talking to the young person. 

And what happened was, the foundation guy, it was his job to ask for money. So there's already kind of a disconnect there. But the young person was just speaking from the heart about the program and about what the organization did for her. And it created an enthusiasm in the donor that got much more than the check. It got a new partner. It got another person to speak on behalf of the organization. And that's why he said, "I'm never going to do another donor call without a young person again." 'Cause it wound up being very powerful. To highlight the benefits to organizations and in particular to communities, I want to share an example with you that is from my time with the 4H youth development program. And it is called the Youth-Led Community Forums Project. So, has anybody here heard of 4H? Okay. 

Has anybody here been involved in 4H? A few, good. Was anybody here involved in the 4H project? Because Wisconsin was one of the states that wound up doing this. The Youth-Led Community Forums Project? Might have been after your time. Okay, all right. Lucky you, because I would have been pulling you out to add your insights. Okay. So, for those of you who don't know a lot about 4H, 4H is the youth arm of the cooperative extension system. And it operates in every state, every county throughout the United States and throughout US territories. So the Youth-Led Community Forums Project began as a project in California where I was serving as the state director. We had a group there that had been trained in National Issues Forum models. 

Anybody heard of National Issues Forum? Okay. So, this might be something you would be interested in learning about, just given the fact that you're in this class. It's a pretty cool model, comes out of Kettering Foundation. National Issues Forum, NIF, is about bringing communities together to talk about the issues that matter to that community in a way that gets them out of positional thinking, away from "I'm for this," "No, I'm against this," and into a way of looking through a lens of values, hopes for the community, fears, and really our visions for what we want for our community. And it uses three different frameworks and asks the community to deliberate together, deliberative dialogue. Around the issues, using each of the frameworks. So like I said, it's a way to get people away from the positional thinking. So there was a group of 4H youth development professionals in California that had been trained in that model and said, "This would be really cool if it didn't just invite young people to participate in the forum, but if young people were actually trained to lead the forums." So we started a project there, just kind of a pilot, to see if we could train young people in this model. We did the NIF training along with -- partnership training and along with facilitation training. And then starting with a couple of different counties had these young people be the ones that actually convened the forums and brought communities together and led the conversations, which was very exciting. 

It works actually really well, and so we expanded it in California, and then a couple of years later when I was serving as the national director for this initiative called the Youth in Governance Initiative, which is really not a great title for what it was trying to accomplish, but the Youth in Governance Initiative was about trying to create more room for youth voices and for youth participation, youth decision making, in the 4H organization nationally, but also in communities nationally. And so we took that model that we had developed in California and took it national. And we wound up, I think to date, I was looking at, I'm not with that initiative anymore, but I think they have involved 12,000 youth and adult partners and community partners throughout 15 states, and have convened multiple forums happening in rural communities throughout the country. And rural communities only because the project went to scale happily because we were able to get some USDA funding that was aimed at rural development. So the model was this. You bring together a core group and they get trained at a national level in the forum's model in -- partnerships and facilitation. And then they get also trained in how to train others. So it's a T-3, or a train the trainer kind of model. They go out then and train other groups and then these other groups go out and each additional team that's been trained leads community forums and leads those community forums through a process after the deliberative dialogue has happened, of developing an action plan. Saying, okay, so what's going to come out of this dialogue and what do we want to do about this issue now that we've spent the evening talking about? And they go back to their communities, they develop these action plans, they do the forums and then develop the action plans and do something really positive for their communities. 

I'll give you a couple of examples. So, there was a group in Delaware that wanted to address the issue of racial and ethnic tensions that had been escalating in their rural community of Georgetown, Delaware. And Georgetown has a 50% Hispanic immigrant population, which is mostly farm workers and poultry workers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. And this group decided to promote cultural awareness by identifying resources on diversity and then stocking those resources in the public library. Books, videos, tapes. And they hosted a program to promoted cultural understanding at the local high school's back-to-school night, and wound up getting official recognition from both the local school board and the state department of education. So they really identified the issue, had meaningful conversations with both community members from all over the community and then implemented this plan. There was a group here in Wisconsin, too. Anybody here from Florence County? Ah, too bad. Well, in Florence County you've got some powerful young people, let me tell you. 

They facilitated forums with high school students and looked at the ways they could improve their community. And as a result, they built a ramp for an individual that had  disabilities, an accessibility ramp. And they restored the ecosystem of the lakeshores of two county parks, planting native plants, restoring trees that had been vandalized. They cleaned up litter, they monitored water quality in the lakes and repainted and repaired old lakeshore structures. So they, again, made quite a difference in their community. And one of the cool things is that these projects that are still happening all over the country have engaged a number of other organizations. So this Florence County group wound up involving the local press, the human services department, the Wisconsin department of natural resources, and the Girl Scouts. And so there's a ripple effect that happens. These other groups come together and they start to see, oh yeah, this youth civic engagement thing, look, they're making a real difference in our communities. And they take that ethos back into their organizations, hopefully, ideally. 

All right. The third and final benefit that I want to chat with you a little bit about is the benefits of youth civic engagement for democracy and social justice. And I will say, as a youth advocate and somebody who's been doing this for a long time, that I think this is probably sometimes the hardest argument for people, the public in general, to understand. Because we tend to see young people as not quite full citizens. There was a bill that was being considered in Colorado some time ago to offer young people, I think it was 16 to 18, the opportunity to vote, but their vote would only count as, like, 5/8 or something like that. It was a little bizarre, and it kind of reminded me a little bit of slavery days. But the good in it was that it was trying to encourage young people to vote earlier and to get engaged earlier. The weirdness of it was that it was saying almost explicitly that youth are not a full person yet. And that I find a little bizarre. So we do have this notion that young people are just waiting, they're not full people until they become adults. 

And so the democracy and social justice argument can be a little more challenging. But my belief is that, if we want to build an effective and engaged citizenry, and that's a good thing, then there's no reason not to be involving young people. That is what will help us accomplish that. And we know from the research that when young people are engaged as young people that they grow up to be adults that are going to be engaged. And that are going to be more philanthropically inclined. So, in other words, if I'm involved as a young person, when I am an adult, I'm more likely to give my time to my community. I'm more likely to give my money to my favorite organizations or to my community. So again, it's a good thing. Kofi Annan, who was the secretary general of the United Nations wrote, "No one is born a good citizen. No nation is born a democracy. 

Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline. It is condemned to bleed to death." So a strong statement. I think, actually, some of the strongest statements and arguments in favor of youth participation have actually come out of the UN, in particular the UN convention on the rights of the child, which was adopted in 1989. And that convention says that really to have a healthy democracy, that youth engagement is critical. And it specifically says in one of the articles, article 12, it specifically says that participation, youth participation, in the decisions that affect their lives, it is a "substantive right of all children and young people. " A substantive right. So this is not a nice idea, this is not a favor that we're going to bestow. This is a substantive right. 

It's a human rights issue to have young people have a voice in the decisions that impact their lives. That's big. And UN adopted the World Program of Action for Youth more than ten years ago now. And again emphasizing the importance for young people to have an opportunity, to have a voice, and to fully participate in all aspects of society. But a report came out in 2007 on the status of the World Program of Action for Youth and the authors concluded that, unfortunately, significant progress was yet to be made. We just haven't done a good job yet. Not just in this country, all over the world. At the international level, too, what I'm seeing and the example I'm going to share with you next is an international example. And what I'm seeing as we are working on this international project is that there is conversation happening in the development world about the need for youth civic engagement, but in the sense of the need for youth to learn civic engagement. And then there's a whole list of other issues that countries need to be dealing with, and never are those two things brought together. 

Youth are not seen as a way to address some of these other issues. So there's youth civic engagement, that's one problem we've got to deal with, and then there's AIDS, and then there's health, and there's all of these other issues. Education, basic education, primary education, all this list. And youth civic engagement is just seen as another problem to be addressed on the list instead of actually a solution and hopefully by now you're getting the point that youth civic engagement is not the problem. It's the solution here. So let me just tell you a little bit about a project that is happening at the international level. And it hasn't happened yet, so I don't have many good pictures to show you. But it is called, a little wordy, Women and Youth Securing Peace in Kenya: Pre-empting Violence in 2012. And this project really began as a conversation that I was having with a Kenyan peace activist, a woman named -- of International Peace Initiatives in Kenya. And her organization really works with adult women as peace leaders. 

But they make the link pretty explicitly between social justice and peace. So in other words, it isn't about peace, you can't have peace without social justice. So those things have to be linked together, and so they deal with a lot of social justice issues, but always with this vision of a peaceful environment, a peaceful community, a peaceful country. And International Peace Initiatives, --'s organization, had not really done a lot of work with youth, but she said, you know, given that 65% of the population in Kenya are young people, it's kind of important to think about it more. And she learned of the Youth Led Community Forums project that I just shared with you and said, this is a model that could be adopted for use in Kenya. And so, thus began a partnership. And the partnership, we're both excited about it, and I think the reason that -- is excited about this is because in her country she sees that there is a hunger for people to be involved in democracy in a more meaningful way. And she sees that there are very few models of leadership, what she calls "leadership that listens." And, hold on just a moment.  Taking a time out for technical difficulties. Okay, good. 

So she feels like there's this gap between what she thinks and what the people of her country believe is possible with democracy and what's actually happening. And if you are familiar with what happened in 2008 with the elections, the general elections in 2008, it was a time of intense violence and civil unrest in Kenya, and, frankly, a lot of corruption. And young people, in particular, the Kenyans say, "Yeah, we know young people are the leaders of tomorrow." But there aren't many opportunities for those young people to actually learn the skills that they need to be the leaders of tomorrow, much less the leaders of today. And the one way that those young people of Kenya have been brought into authentic, if you will, leadership, real leadership roles, is by being recruited as agents of violence. And so the government has used them, the military has used them to pick up guns and to be instigators of violence. Well, there are other possibilities here, and that's what this project is about. One of the things that we're seeing, unfortunately, is it's 2010 now, and the next elections are in 2012, and we're already in Kenya starting to see examples of violence beginning to erupt. And so this project is, it's very similar to the community forums project, in that it is a ground up approach to civil society building, to social change. That is, it's based on the philosophy that you don't need outside experts to come in and tell any community what they need to do. You need resources and time and support for the community to identify what their issues are and to identify what assets they have to work with, a community based assets approach. 

And then some additional resources to help them accomplish what they want to accomplish. So the outside expert thing just doesn't work. The project that this will be doing is, in hopefully next year, 2011, it will begin with a training, actually first a training of some youth leaders to help lead a national training event and a national convent. And they will be bringing teams from all over Kenya. The eight provinces of Kenya will each bring a team of around ten youth and five women, grassroots women, peace leaders, that will partner with them. And those teams will come together and be trained in the national issues forum model and in community, collaborative leadership, and asset based community development, -- partnerships, peace building, and conflict negotiation, conflict mediation, as well as looking at how to apply some of the skills that they're learning to entrepreneurial activities, because there is a real need for some entrepreneurial training, too. So we're just going to do both while we're there. But the exciting thing is that the partnerships that are forming to make this happen will model what we're talking about and what we're training. And so for instance, we've got International Peace Initiatives in Kenya, who is one of the lead organizations. And from the US, the Innovations Center for Community and Youth Development is a lead partner. 

The University of Nairobi is a partner. The University of California is a partner, and then there are multiple youth organizations in Kenya who are wanting to partner with us. So there will be a partnership of organizations, and then in terms of the training, there will be US trainers, and Kenya-based trainers. There will be adult trainers, there will be youth trainers. So throughout the process, we're modeling that partnership, that collaborative leadership, and that asset based approach to change. Like I said, we're hoping to launch the project in 2011, and use it as a way to equip communities to preempt any potential violence that may break out during the elections in 2012. So we're pretty excited about that. The teams that get trained at the national level will go back to their province, train additional teams, and we anticipate that each of the eight provinces training five additional teams, so there will be 40 teams throughout the country and each of those teams will lead probably multiple community forums, so we expect to have thousands of people throughout Kenya involved in this project by the end. And the ultimate vision is that Kenya is the starting place and some other countries that Kenya and in fact --'s organization, in particular, has done peace work with, including Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, southern Sudan and Burundi, we anticipate being able to take the model, then, to some of those other countries. So we're hoping to bring some peace leaders from those countries to the national training in Kenya and get them excited about the idea and then move the model back to their countries. 

What I think I will do is pause there or stop here and just open it up. I would love to hear from you about your thoughts about youth civic engagement, and I would love to hear questions or just insights that you have, or experiences that you may have had with youth civic engagement yourself. Let's have some conversation. >> Yasiri: And I'll be happy to pass the mic to anybody who has a question. >> MacNeil: Or a story. >> Hello. I guess my question is, for Project Yes, were most of those projects funded by the school boards and systems, and what would you suggest now since most of the school boards around the country are having budget problems? >> MacNeil: Funding is a big issue for nonprofits right now. They're hurting hard. No, most projects were not funded by school boards. This wasn't school funding. 

This was a grant funding, but the grant was only eligible to schools, so it was the school that was the lead partner in it, in partnership with us. So that was how it was being funneled through them. But yeah, I think that in the nonprofit sector, we have to look long and hard and more strategically at our possibilities for collaboration. Because, you're right, schools are hurting, but there's still some money out there for schools. I'm doing some work on youth engagement in school culture change with a district in Denver. They just got a multi-million dollar grant from Ford Foundation. So there are some partnerships that can be built. Now, I'll tell you, Project Yes would never have gotten a multi-million dollar grant from Ford Foundation. But they could be a good partner with the school system and could bring something that the schools can't do, and I think that's what we have to do, is to think about what are the things that each of us can bring to the table that might be unique, so that the partnership there is a win-win situation. But you bring up a really good point. 

The funding situation is pretty scary right now for a lot of nonprofits. They're struggling and many going under. There was a question here.  >> Please talk a little bit about the process of the Yes project, how decisions were made and how problems were solved. For examples, did the adults come in with a stronger facilitation role early and then back off, or were the youth prepared in facilitation, or did you just let it unfold naturally? >> Thank you, that's a good question. So, prompt me if I forget any part of the question. >> Oh, that's up to you. >> So yeah, one of the things that we found was that the structure was really important, and that having the youth co-create the structure was important. And so one of the things that we did right off the bat was decide what were going to be the group norms and have the group decide what the group norms were going to be. And we usually had at least one rule that we said, "We get to throw in one," because we're the leaders of the project, and so we get to save one. 

And that was usually just one that allowed us to have a time out, that everyone agreed, that if we said, "Time out," that everyone stopped whatever they were doing. That was just a safety thing. But often we didn't even need to bring a rule in because the groups were pretty hard on themselves. They would develop this list of commitments that they were going to make to each other that was sometimes so long we had to post it every time, and then they would start saying, "You're violating number 13-b," and it was like, "Ah, okay." But they began to really own that structure themselves, because we said, this is your group, and you've got to make some decisions. Yeah, there was a little bit more heavy-handed facilitation at the beginning to help the group create that structure, but always at some point there was a shift and the group would just sort of take ownership and monitor each other and make decisions about, how are we going to operate together? And create those norms. And it was very interesting, too, because we had this rule of 100% attendance. And it was something that a lot of the young people who came into Project Yes were not used to. And when, on the occasion that a young person would miss, we would throw it to the group to say, "All right, we have this rule of 100% attendance, so-and-so missed, what are we going to do?" And the group would make the decision about what they were going to do. And they were pretty firm. Sometimes they'd say, "You can come back, but you got to do these three things if you're going to come back into the group." So it wound up not being a problem. 

Like I said, the one group, the peace park group was the one group that I worried about a little bit. When the fists were going through the walls it was like, "Oh, are we really going to make it?" But they did, they came around and began to regulate themselves as well. It just took a little bit longer, because they were used to operating with each other in a very violent way of interacting. So it was a little different for that group. But yeah, groups always came around and self-regulated. Did that answer your question? Yes. >> I have two questions. The first one has to do with how you find out which community or which school has a meaningful project that you can be involved. Do you go to them, or what? And the second question is, from what I'm hearing from you today, is that you provide facilitation, you provide training to them. What other resources, what other support do you give to the school or the group who needs your help? >> Good question. 

Well, so how do you identify groups, first of all, to get involved with? And is your question also about recruiting, how do you welcome and identify and invite youth to participate in programs? Or is it more about... >> That would be an extension of that question. (inaudible) >> So, as an adult, if I wanted to go and be engaged in a project, how could I find that? Well, I think there's a couple things. Hanging out with young people, just finding a place to hang out with young people. Volunteering at a youth organization, a community based organization or volunteering in the school, and listening to the young people, not the adults, but listening to the young people. You can listen to the adults, too, but listen to the young people about what they want to be working on and what's important to them. And that sort of ground up process, the ground level up, will start to steer you in directions where the young people feel a compelling need to really do something and to be involved in something. And to find an adult who says, yeah, I want to support you, what do you want to work on? is a gift. It's a real gift to a young person and I think the other side of that is, how as an organization do you identify and recruit young people. In the beginning when we founded Project Yes, nobody knew who we were. 

And we didn't have a budget. We didn't have any money, really, at all when we started it. And so what we did was, we started going to other organizations or to schools and saying, "Here's what we do. Are there young people that you would recommend for this?" And people started sending young people. They said, gosh, this is a person I can't reach and I don't know what the problem is and I think he's going to drop out of school, he really needs something. And, "Can you offer something?" And so that started happening. We started getting referrals. And then over time, it was the youth that started bringing in other youth. So they'd go back and say, "You've got to do this thing called Project Yes," and da-da-da. And then it became a word of mouth thing. 

But that network is strong. And now, like, when we started Project Yes, you didn't have all of the internet opportunities. So that would be another great resource, is to get online and see what young people are doing here locally. And there's some incredible organizations, really all over the country, that you can get involved with in some way if you've got access to a computer. You don't even have to be on site. Taking it Global is a really cool organization for those of you who might be interested at the international level aspect of things. That's an organization that is by youth, for youth, supporting young people's engagement in community change all over the world. And then was there another part to your question? >> (inaudible)  >> I think what I have learned is that the biggest resource that you have to bring is some flexibility and some creativity, because every group is unique. And so I always say the most important thing is the belief that it can happen, you know, and the belief in the young people, and the belief that you can make the project happen. And then second is just the creativity and flexibility to say, what have you got already? Again, it's this asset based community development model. 

So you start with, what have we got already? And what are the resources we have within this group? What are the resources that we have in our larger community, and how do we tap into those? And so it's always a little bit of an investigative process. But we start always with the group of young people and what they already know and what they already know how to do. And then the group will often identify where it is that they need some additional resources. But it's very powerful to start with the group and help them uncover what they already know and the expertise they already have. Thank you. Yes? >> My question is, does Project Yes have a way of monitoring their students once they get out of the program? If it's through graduation, or done with the program as they feel? >> It's a good question and it's an issue for a lot of youth organizations. It's a real challenge for a lot of youth organizations because we're so mobile, and particularly a lot of the populations that Project Yes works with tend to be very mobile and move around and change members a lot. It has gone easier. In the beginning, Project Yes was a project based organization, meaning that the model moved around a lot. In fact, it started in Boston and moved to Colorado, but it moved around all over Colorado. 

It went where the groups were. And so it became very difficult. If the young people didn't stay connected to us, it was very difficult for us to continue to track them. Now, at a certain point, the young people in Project Yes said, "You know, this is great, but after a project, we want a place to go. We want to be able to go hang out with other people who have done Project Yes." And so they wanted a center. And so we opened a center and built a center. And that actually has made it easier to stay in touch because they know where to find us and a lot of them wind up coming back to serve as volunteers and to be leaders of additional projects. So that's allowed them, since I'm not in the organization anymore, it's allowed them to track a little bit better. Yeah, thank you. Any other questions?  >> Yasiri: Well, Carole, I know the group joins me in thanking you so much for your presentation tonight. 

>> My pleasure. (applause) Thank you, thank you.