The Role of Youth Engagement in Youth Development Efforts in Communities

When I was six years old, I remember hearing two words on the radio quite often. Those words were guerrilla and Negro. I had been to the Bronx Zoo a few times, so I thought I knew what a guerrilla was. Much to my surprise, after asking my father, I found out it wasn't the kind of animal I had in mind.

"Well then, what is a guerrilla?" I asked.

"The guerrilla they were talking about on the radio is a liberation fighter. As I explained to you before, there are all kinds of wars going on around the world, and this "guerrilla" wages war differently than what you see on television or have been taught in school."

"OK. And what is a Negro?" I asked.

"Look in the mirror," my father said.

The harshness of his answer both surprised and shocked me. But being that I had politically active parents, I came to realize that something was terribly wrong with a society that puts distinctions on individuals or groups based solely on color. I was also grateful that my parents encouraged me as a youth to work with my peers to design “rap” sessions and workshops that seriously addressed the questions of the day. As the next few years of my life unfolded, through these rap sessions and informal workshops with my peers, I realized that as a "Negro," in order to be considered equal to white people, I would have to spend much of my time de-emphasizing the distinction of color. This realization was very painful for me because I had also been taught to appreciate the distinction of color as it related to cultural achievement and pride.

These experiences brought me full circle insofar as developing, as a teenager, working models for social change. First, if change is inevitable, we need to direct the change instead of just watching it pass on by and second, that as social change activists, we need to instill through our work the clear understanding that we most likely will never see the end result of what we are striving for, but the notion that we are clearly creating a better world for our children is rooted in love, respect and vision.

I have always tried to show youth the connection between consciousness and action. When youth understand that most of what happens to them in their life is not a coincidence they suddenly realize that they have more power to change their particular circumstances than they thought they had.

The best examples of the role of youth engagement in youth development efforts is creating future leaders and seeing our young people recognize that their consciousness has been raised and that that their level of understanding attained is the beginning of the change and not the end result of change. Too many times after youth and/or organizations reach stated goals, they become complacent because they feel that the work is over and there is no more left to accomplish.

I feel my greatest success and contribution to youth development has been my own consulting business Isms & Issues (profile was included in my application materials). I started this consulting business with the purpose being to offer youth and leaders an opportunity to increase their understanding of how discrimination and oppression operate to disempower targeted group people (youth, women, people of color, gays and lesbians). Isms & Issues work with organizations to help develop an understanding on how to “interrupt” racist, sexist and homophobic behavior. Because of the initial success of Isms & Issues, I added additional workshops over the years in fiscal management, leadership training, legislative analysis and customized workshops dealing with pertinent and particular concerns on the part of any group I work with.

The foundation of "unlearning" workshops is that "for social change to occur, we have to be willing to unlearn certain forms of behavior that we have spent our whole lives learning." We must address how we have been socialized to accept misinformation as fact. On a personal and political level, it is very difficult to get people to see that how we communicate with each other is a political question. You just can't assume that if everybody wants the world to be a better place, and wishes it so, then it will magically happen. It takes work and an understanding of how dominant culture assumptions operate and how disempowered people collaborate with those assumptions.

In conclusion, I feel that as adult leaders must take responsibility to help youth develop frameworks that translate historical lessons into a language they not only understand, but can mobilize and educate as well. We also need to help youth understand the power and necessity of building coalitions and the fact that their movement will self-destruct unless it links up with segments of the community that have been institutionally excluded from decision-making processes. Youth engagement and youth development is a viable alternative, but it must close the loop and force larger institutional structures to meet their needs and not rely on surpluses coming from the very system they expect to replace.