 Over the last 10 years, I have seen countless nonprofit leaders (myself included) with after school programs, summer internships, leadership development trainings, and myriad other “opportunities” practically beg for student involvement, or just resign themselves to facilitating to half-empty rooms of teenagers. I have seen schools expand programming for “opportunities” like credit recovery, tutoring, mentoring, leadership, college nights, and many more, only to feel that their efforts were rebuked by disinterested students when no one showed up.
I have seen dozens of business leaders who wanted to share their expertise and their time to provide financial education, career orientation, job shadowing, mentorship and other “opportunities” become bewildered and ultimately driven away by the lack of apparent student interest. So, what’s the problem? Why don’t teens seize all of our “opportunities”? The most common adult response in my experience has been simply to blame the teen: You know how teens are! (Insert eye roll and/or deep sigh here along with shaking head.) But, unless we are really ready to disregard the vast majority of teenagers as apathetic do-nothings, we need to figure out a better response. We need to figure out our real “opportunity” gap – the gap between what matters and is engaging for teens and what we are actually offering. So, here are three A’s we can use to “stress test” our opportunities. These criteria might help us understand why some of our efforts have been successful and others not so much. Is the opportunity: 1. ACCESSIBLE Is the opportunity concrete and tangible? Executive decision-making around abstract future consequences, deferred gratification, or possible future opportunities is not in the teen brain biology. What does it mean to them now? Does its concreteness mesh with the self-concept of the teen? In other words, “opportunity” doesn’t necessarily mean “opportunity for me”. If I believe I’m not college material, then opportunities around college don’t really feel like opportunities, no matter how concrete they are. Is the opportunity communicated in terms that are relevant and relatable to students? “You need to eat your vegetables” is too often our model for communicating opportunities to teens. It doesn’t work. Our communications should help teens want to engage, not just tell them they should. Is the opportunity communicated in a medium that teens like and can easily access? Most of us have created posters no one sees, written school announcements no one hears, sent emails that no one reads, provided stacks of paper applications no one ever hears about, and on and on. We need to work with teens on a better communication strategy. We can do better. 2. ASPIRATIONAL Does the opportunity tap into something important to the teen? This is where we need to be better at including teen voice and leadership in the design of opportunities for teens. We can’t know what’s important to them without asking! Does it connect with something positive and forward looking – according to their standards and goals (and perhaps guided by ours as well)? Adults support teens by helping them generate goals and aspirations, but teens must own those goals if they are going to matter when they are faced with the choice between going to the mall or to tutoring. 3. ATTAINABLE Can it really happen and do they believe it? Depending on the opportunity, attainability can boil down to something as simple as access to transportation or as complex as overcoming cultural and social expectations. Regardless, the teen has to believe he really can make it happen. Is there a pathway and a personal plan? A plan and “my plan” are two very different things. “Your plan” for me is something altogether different again. There is no need to run ourselves ragged trying to get opportunities to students. Like any of us, they are seizing and rejecting opportunities all day, every day. If we want them to seize our opportunities, we need to start by making sure they pass the AAA test.
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If we want students to participate, we need to provide opportunities for them to participate.
If we want student voice, we need to create avenues to hear and capture it meaningfully. If we want students to be leaders, we need to be willing to step back and let them lead. Every day, adults use terms like voice, leadership, and engagement, and we design opportunities and programs based on them – but typically based on an indecipherable mash-up of what are unique and distinct concepts. Several years back, seeking clarity, I sat down in an attempt to organize and articulate some of these terms more fully. I ended up writing the Continuum of Youth Involvement. I wanted to help adults get on the same page about what we really want, what we are really willing to give up, and what we can gain when it comes to the meaningful involvement of our students/youth. After all, if we don’t know what we want from the start then we will continue to build programs and opportunities that don’t live up to our ill-defined aspirations (or perhaps surpass them in ways we are unprepared to see). If we don’t know what we are willing to give up as adults (power) then we will inevitably over-promise and under-deliver for the student in regard to their power. If we try to collaborate with youth and with other partners without clarifying our expectations, we will end up with little to show for our efforts. For example, I have seen countless schools, community groups, and citywide youth collaboratives who all said they were interested in “student voice”. So, they work for days or weeks or even months together around this idea only to find out that one person, or an entire group, just meant that they wanted to survey youth, another wanted focus groups and a youth on the “youth voice” committee, and yet another wanted students to have an ongoing and unfettered say on important issues in the school and community. After all that time and work, they realized they were never even close to being on the same page. Now what? Days, weeks, and months of work go down the tubes. Adults are frustrated. Youth are confused. Energy and resources are wasted. The efforts of the group often get documented in a wholly un-actionable set of ideas, plans, and programs and most everyone returns to business as usual. Worse yet, adults are less likely to invest in youth voice again (even through a better process) and students are less likely to trust adults when they hear that term. So, let’s commit to saying what we really want and are prepared to work for first. Let’s be honest about where we are and where we want to be along the Continuum of Youth Involvement. If we don’t have many students participating, let’s start there and not talk about engagement yet. If we aren’t sure how to develop meaningful leadership opportunities, let’s start by listening to students and get their “voice” on what is important to them. We can co-create leadership from there. If engagement feels too abstract, let’s work with students to facilitate real leadership, which done well, will spur deeper engagement. Before we can do what we say, we need to know what we are saying. Young people say it best. Forget the politics; let’s talk experience. Forget feelings; tell it like it is. The title is a quote from a college student panelist at a past America’s Promise Grad Nation Summit.
Since hearing this, my mind has gone a hundred different directions thinking about why and how and where this plays out for a young man like this. He had been practically defaulted by his community into gang membership at age 12 and his unnamable, burning anger as a child for his life circumstances left him restless, fearful, combative, and often in school suspension (and yet making straight A’s). Who was fake? What was fake? What does fake even mean to a student in these circumstances? Why was a 12 year old worried about his own survival? At the end of the day, maybe the specific answers don’t matter that much. In fact, determining the specific answers for this young man would probably only do just that – give the answers specific to him. But, here’s what we need to acknowledge: Too many adults in his school and community were “fakes”. And, this means there are likely hundreds of thousands of other youth out there who feel the same way, even if for varying reasons. But expounding on the non-virtues that create a fake is a pretty useless effort. So, alternatively, how can we be real? After all, it’s a matter of survival! To be real, we have to be willing to be abstract. We have to own and work toward something we cannot calculate or put in a chart or checklist somewhere and say: “hey, we did it!” And yet, we all know “real” when we experience it. Being real isn’t an action, or even something you show. Realness is a mutual feeling, a oneness between people. It is the medium of a genuine relationship. It requires knowledge of the other and values his unique experiences. It shares power. It suspends judgment for understanding. It means getting dirty. Sharing pain. Sharing success. Being uncomfortable. It is presence. It is trust. It is humility. Being real means seeing and believing and living such that my destiny and your destiny are inextricably linked. In the words of Dr. King: “I cannot be what I ought to be until your are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Now, that’s real! And, the more we talk about young people as test scores, budget items, graduation statistics, or care for them only based on their buying power, we move from mutual destiny to otherness and individual outcome. We disentangle ourselves and relinquish that which makes us “us” – and something more than merely you and I. We make ourselves and others finite variables in an educational and economic discourse that we pretend we have little control over, and yet create and recreate every day. Young people know this and feel this, and it feels fake. Thankfully, they will call it what it is! Now, we should listen and work with them to get real. “In a real sense all life is inter-related…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…this is the way that the world was made…I didn’t make it that way, but this is the inter-related structure of reality.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Young people say it best. Forget the politics; let’s talk experience. Forget feelings; tell it like it is. The title is a quote from a college student panelist at the recent America’s Promise Grad Nation Summit.
Since hearing this, my mind has gone a hundred different directions thinking about why and how and where this plays out for a young man like this. He had been practically defaulted by his community into gang membership at age 12 and his unnamable, burning anger as a child for his life circumstances left him restless, fearful, combative, and often in school suspension (and yet making straight A’s). Who was fake? What was fake? What does fake even mean to a student in these circumstances? Why was a 12 year old worried about his own survival? At the end of the day, maybe the specific answers don’t matter that much. In fact, determining the specific answers for this young man would probably only do just that – give the answers specific to him. But, here’s what we need to acknowledge: Too many adults in his school and community were “fakes”. And, this means there are likely hundreds of thousands of other youth out there who feel the same way, even if for varying reasons. But expounding on the non-virtues that create a fake is a pretty useless effort. So, alternatively, how can we be real? After all, it’s a matter of survival! To be real, we have to be willing to be abstract. We have to own and work toward something we cannot calculate or put in a chart or checklist somewhere and say: “hey, we did it!” And yet, we all know “real” when we experience it. Being real isn’t an action, or even something you show. Realness is a mutual feeling, a oneness between people. It is the medium of a genuine relationship. It requires knowledge of the other and values his unique experiences. It shares power. It suspends judgment for understanding. It means getting dirty. Sharing pain. Sharing success. Being uncomfortable. It is presence. It is trust. It is humility. Being real means seeing and believing and living such that my destiny and your destiny are inextricably linked. In the words of Dr. King: “I cannot be what I ought to be until your are what you ought to be, and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Now, that’s real! And, the more we talk about young people as test scores, budget items, graduation statistics, or care for them only based on their buying power, we move from mutual destiny to otherness and individual outcome. We disentangle ourselves and relinquish that which makes us “us” – and something more than merely you and I. We make ourselves and others finite variables in an educational and economic discourse that we pretend we have little control over, and yet create and recreate every day. Young people know this and feel this, and it feels fake. Thankfully, they will call it what it is! Now, we should listen and work with them to get real. “In a real sense all life is inter-related…We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…this is the way that the world was made…I didn’t make it that way, but this is the inter-related structure of reality.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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