Back in 2004 the ever-insightful Anastacia Goodstein at YPulse suggested young people might be oversharing on their blogs. She says, "Personally I think if teens want to use blogs as full blown diaries where they are sharing everything about their lives (especially incriminating info), they should probably do it under a pseudonym." In this sense, oversharing may be a sort of trojan horse that takes Youth Voice and encourages otherwise well-meaning adults to advocate for anonymity among young people struggling to make their voices, ideas, experiences and wisdom relevant to the world. Perhaps a different angle on this would be to promote actively educating young people about the opportunities and challenges of writing online, as Goodstein herself knows well. This would empower young people to maintain their identity, as any good journalist strives to, while reporting on the issues that matter to them most- which in many cases seem to be their own lives.

Still others have warned about the dangers of oversharing on the futures of young people, as they seek to be taken seriously in job interviews, college applications and other scenarios. Some see oversharing as a blight upon the lands, while others laud oversharing as a way to break the ice in otherwise awkward social situations.

This has been an overview of oversharing. Let me think about this, and I'll revist the actual impacts of oversharing on youth voice soon.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

Like I wrote last time, I did apply myself; only as a thorn in the side of adults around me. I was 15 when I tried to join the environmental club at my high school. The science teacher who ran it quickly let me know I couldn't join because my grades were too low. I knew that was bunkus, mostly because I lived in a neighborhood that was filled with environmental contamination and a bad, bad track record of only getting worse, not better. So I decided to create my own environmental club. I wrote a manifesto and borrowed the photocopier at the local church to make the copies that I handed out to every single adult in the school. In my vision, the North Environmental Action Team would be an after school activity for students from the neighborhood to fight their own problems. My high school was a magnet school where the majority of white students were bused in from another part of the city; students from my neighborhood were mostly low-income whites and African Americans. Well, the North Environmental Action Team, or NEAT, never found an adult sponsor in the school. It wasn't for lack of trying: I talked to every adult there. But that didn't deter us. Instead, there were several guerrilla activist projects we did, including clearing the dumpsters of recyclables and giving the principal Earth Day greeting cards made of cardboard with 500+ student signatures on them. And maybe a little eco-centric graffiti here and there.

The reason I wanted to "revisit" my notion of "that kid" is that I'm afraid I made out myself to be something other than I was. In simple reality I was just another young person who was trying to make it through difficult circumstances. In my prattling off a list of friends, I neglected to mention all the adults who made a difference in my life when I was young. There was Idu Maduli and Laura Partridge-Nedds, both of whom I worked with in a drama program called "You're The Star," and who gave me the motivation I needed to work with young people for the rest of my life. There were ministers, too, like Helen and Steve and Jamie. My parents' friends kept me in line, especially Tracy's mom, Betty, and when I was young, Kal's mom, who called me "Trouble" from the age I was 12. All these adults, and so many more, helped me through my younger years. My dad's friend Chuck took me to my first play and helped me audition for my first theater performance. 

All this is to say that I can't paint a decisive picture of my own youth in own blog entry. This was a little more info to say that just like all of us, the sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts. Its important to remember this when we think of engaging youth, especially that kid.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

I was that kid: a little more excited, a little more motivated and a  little more interested than the other young people around me. Sure, I grew up in a rough neighborhood, but there were those among us who stood out. I was the kid who other parents pointed to- literally- and asked their kids  why they weren't more like me.

When I was really young I sat with my parents while they talked with their friends. I helped my mom clean the house, listened carefully when my dad lectured me, and used my newspaper route money to help pay family bills. I  volunteered for the neighborhood elementary school's PTA when I was in  junior high, and was the school's Santa Claus for 3 years. I joined the church leadership council when I was 14. I made up a guerilla environmental justice activism group for my friends when I was 15. I helped stock in the  food bank my family was assisted by, sat with my dad to watch Habitat for  Humanity sites while they were being built, and started a neighborhood youth council when I was 17. I was that kid.

I hung around with a few different handfuls of friends throughout school who were subjected to my ambitions. Tracy and Marlin and Joe and I were  friends from 5th grade into high school. They were my neighborhood friends who played video games and basketball with me, joining the scout troop my dad started and riding scooters with me around North Omaha. There was Kelly and Tara and Lesley and other girlfriends in junior high, and in high school I had really good friends who didn't live right in my neighborhood. Bethany and Erin and Mary and Brian and Jason set templates for the friends that I have wanted throughout all the rest of my life. I was tight with my friends in scouts, too, especially when Jimmy, Nick, Scott, Jaimie and I were able to get together outside that program. All of these people were subjected to my peculiar brand of obosteriousness, overzealousness and enthusiasm, and lucky for me they tolerated it for as long as they did. They were the mirrors that I saw myself through and wanted to be more like. But I can say now, through the lenses of time and space and distance that none of them were identical to me. They each shown brightly in their own ways, and while I don't know where almost any of them are today, I believe they must be doing well, or at least okay, because of those ways they shown brightly.

Looking back at it, it is youth like my teenage friends who I believe are the "outlyers" of youth involvement. They tended to fall into that realm of "middle achievers" in youth voice, those who neither glowed or were fully thwarted; instead, they were just *there* in many cases. Now, to remind you I am talking about youth voice specifically; a lot of my friends were academically gifted, athletically skilled or socially wonderful. Some had the gift of gab while others aced tests and won trophies. I didn't hang out with a lot of ruffians, and my friends were a lot of things I simply wasn't in a lot of respects. But thinking about their expressions of engagement, their infusions of ability and energy related to sharing their unique ideas, opinions, actions and wisdom, I can't recall a lot of "umph." None of them were that kid- that was my job. 

We need to reach those young people. In workshops I'll often share a piece of informal observation tool Greg Williamson and I once created. Its a pie chart split into 25, 50 and 25 percent slices. One 25 percent slice represents children and youth like I was: no matter what the situation, what the resistance or supports, we were always going to be heard. Generally this 25 percent's voices are impossible to thwart or suppress. The other 25 percent slice represents the most oppressed, the young people whose voices are most squelched because of poverty or abuse or other dire situations. Tonight I'm thinking about that other slice, that 50 percent right in the middle who show up because their mom told them they had to go, or whose girlfriend picked them up and made them go, or were simply there because they didn't have anything better to do at that moment. Those are the young people who are caught in the middle between extremities. They generally aren't involved in honors clubs or recitivism programs; instead, they are young people who don't stand out in crowds, who don't stand up in meetings and who don't connect with their communities in meaningful ways as they grow up. 

Let's stop focusing on that kid and reach those kids: these who are moving away from small towns, who don't vote, and who have broken the cycles of social capital that once tied together our communities. Those who perform vanishing acts when volunteers are sought out and those who sit quietly at the back of the room when their opinions are sought. And let me be clear here: its not their fault they aren't engaged. Rather, its the failure of our communities as a whole, and particularly those adults in their lives who are responsible for providing substantive, sustainable and real opportunities for them to be heard. That's the only way we can move this movement forward- as a whole. 

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

In Washington, DC this week I had an excellent conversation with a woman named Ashley Keenan who works with the Parent Support Network of Rhode Island. Her work focuses on engaging children's voices and creating opportunities for them to become meaningfully involved in Systems of Care, specifically for kids under 8. 

What spectacular work! Listening to her stories I was inspired, causing me to remember the excitement I felt when my daughter was very, very young (she is 5 now). I love the prospect of engaging really young children and changing the roles adults have always assigned them. Especially because we have an increasing amoung of research focused on this that clearly illustrates the benefits of age-appropriate decision-making on children's growth and evolution. Its so exciting! As I became I parent and have experienced the awesomeness of my daughter's growth over these last years I have come to believe there is no age more relevant for fostering lifelong commitment to Youth Voice. These people, infants, toddles, pre-schoolers and kindergarteners, will become the parents, teachers, youth workers, childcare providers, police, politicians, social workers, policy-makers, secretaries, ambassadors, and every single other position in our society. It seems weird but necessary to say that every single person in our world has been a child. How that childhood is experienced and expressed varies according to cultural, economical, ethnic, educational, and other backgrounds that inform young people as they grow up. But regardless of our backgrounds, all of us need to have opportunities to use our voices when we're this young. All of us.

I see it in the actions of the mom sitting in front of me on the airplane as she plays with her baby boy. He's a happy, giggling guy and she's asking him questions, acknowledging his language as valid even though nobody beyond him and her understand it. I hear it from my daughter when she comes home from school so happy because her teacher asked her to pick which book the class got to read aloud today. This voice might be a simple question about which clothes or food, but repeated throughout the day in a variety of forms these questions become a force for significant learning within a young person's life. I see these choices and hear these voices in dozens of small acts everyday that I'm with young people, the youngest of people, and I am honestly excited everytime, and it gives me hope. 

Those are the actions, the gestures, the interactions and opportunities we need to educate people about. While some of them come naturally, intrinsically, to moms and dads and grandparents and loving, kind, caring adults throughout the lives of children, many of these skills and abilities are learned and need to be nurtured throughout adulthood. We need to work to ensure all young people have safe and supportive and empowering lives while they're young. We need to make sure the adults who surround them have capable as well. Only then can we actually engage very young children, and then we'll be able to develop and sustain a lifetime continuum of youth engagement.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

Today I'm thinking about how to express my so-far obtuse "Architecture of Youth Empowerment." I've tried before; however, rereading and listening anew to the experiences of people around me has helped me create a new visualization to express the relevance of our varying ideas about youth voice, engagement, involvement and empowerment.

I want you to stand outside a huge building with me. This building represents youth empowerment. For those of you familiar with my work, you'll know that I've long rejected youth empowerment as a motivating ideology for this work. However, I do believe that empowerment is the ultimate goal of voice, involvement and engagement. Its the keen purpose why all this work is so relevant and meaningful, from whichever angle it takes. Take a look across the building in front of you and decide what it looks like to you- maybe its a temple at Bangalore, or a Tlingit longhouse, or a state capitol- whatever it is, make sure its grand and wonderful, and that you can see one whole side. You can't see the whole thing- we can never fully know this magically evolutionary work we're engaged in- but definitely look at one whole side.

The foundation of youth empowerment is youth voice. Youth voice is the active, distinct, and concentrated ways young people represent themselves throughout society. The way adults respond to youth voice is essential for the radically democratic social change I envision for our society; however, and luckily, youth voice is not contingent on adults' response. I believe its our ethical obligation as a democratically-minded society to ensure the active, effective and sustained engagement of youth voice throughout society, and that is why I believe it is the foundation of youth empowerment. The root prefix of empowerment- em- means with. With power. The concept of youth empowerment inherently insists that adults experience power with young people, and that begins with youth voice. Voice is the base expression of any person that can happen in any form.

Distinctly different from this foundation are the walls that hold up the building. These walls represent youth involvement. Different from voice, involvement is the structural supports we create in order to move towards youth empowerment. For a long time well-meaning adults believed that in order to successfully empower young people they had to just listen to them- then trying to do that in the absence of strong walls. The youth involvement walls that hold up our youth empowerment building are made of four primary elements: Reflection, Knowledge-building, Skill-sharing, and Action. These are the main ways young people become involved.

The strong foundation and the powerful walls are capped by the roof of youth engagement. Engagement is a feeling that we have when we're deeply connected with people, an idea, work or potentially any other thing in our lives. Some people mistake engagement with engrossment; but they're different. When you're engrossed in something you can't remove your concentration from it: a video game, crocheting, a new album, sports, and good novels can do this for me. Similarly, engagement is not the same as involvement. Instead, engagement is a peronal emotional reaction we develop in response to excitement, entanglement, entwinement and enculturation. Its a feeling. No building can withstand the tests of time without a strong roof, and youth empowerment requires that roof to be engagement.

The interaction of these three elements- voice, involvement and engagement- combine to form a healthy, effective and sustainable experience for all young people to become more powerful with us. I believe this is how we build youth engagement.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

I've spent the last two days at a TA Partnership meeting on youth involvement in Systems of Care. For those of you who don't know, Systems of Care is a coordination framework for ensuring that the individuals and organizations involved in providing care for young people who are in foster care, who have been homeless, or other circumstances where our communities are responsible for an individual young person's well-being. The question this group of practitioners is considering is how to effectively and sustainably involve young people in their own care. I am very humbled by the amount of knowledge, depth and perspective the folks here possess, and it drives home a point for me.

About 5 years ago my friend and ally, Andrea Felix, wrote a paper about the Youth Voice Movement for Youth Service America. She suggested that organizations committed to Youth Voice be connected to each other, and working with organizations Andrea facilitated a series of forums in cities across the U.S. In response I wrote an article for the National Youth Leadership Council addressing the reality that the Youth Voice Movement had always existed - it just exists in ways a lot of people aren't capable of seeing.

After spending 9 years looking for new ways of seeing Youth Voice, I am still discovering new ways Youth Voice is happening, being taught, encouraged, engaged, infused, parlayed, leveraged and otherwise heard. I have been part of dozens of rallies, observed and interacted with hundreds of programs, studied a lot of literature and research and spent thousands of hours in conversations dialoging with youth and adults about Youth Voice. And I'm still learning more.

Sitting in a room full of fulltime Youth Voice practitioners I am reminded that we must move past our organizational and field boundaries. I have personally been exposed to Youth Voice initiatives in the following professional fields:

And the list grows on. This list looks similar to the list of Issues on The Freechild Project website, but its different because of its meaning: rather than being the things youth are addressing with Youth Voice, these are the actual professional fields where Youth Voice is taking hold as an element.

These are the roots of the Youth Voice Movement today. These are the places, spaces and people who we need to engage in developing, strengthening, and fostering Youth Voice in communities across the nation and around the world.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

Article 12 of the CDC states:

In response to that call for action more than 100 nations around the world have instituted a variety of measures to ensure youth involvement. These include the establishment of youth secretatiates, youth ombudspeople, youth liasions, youth councils, and many, many other systemic efforts to promote youth voice. Powerful! There are legitimate concerns about Article 12, and those shouldn't be dismissed; however, it does success in providing a starting point for the conversation, which is wholly missing in U.S. policy today.

So the U.S. is struggling to find its own way to ensure youth involvement. The lobbyists in D.C. are working on behalf of dozens of organizations to challenge the Obama administration to involve youth, and there are plenty of efforts to systematize youth involvement that are in effect right now. However, it seems we're doing this devoid of U.N. examples, without role models, nothing. All the coordination in Europe, all the expertise in Canada and all the collaboration in Micronesian countries seem to do nothing to overtly inform the attempts in the U.S. Instead, anything that comes from any of this advocacy is going to happen because of an authentic rush from the ground up. 

That adds to the excitement in a sense- although it continues to remind me of the disappointing isolationism this country has sunk into over the last 8 years. We need to rise above our sometimes shallow perspectives and see the paths that have been made by other countries, and from there move forward. We need to pay attention to our international youth involvement role models.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

These are times when adult allyship is more important than ever before. Ours is an increasingly adultcetric society that is completely comfortable with youth segregation; by identifying that, examining it, educating it and challenging it we can end the stigma that surrounds young people. We aren't post-youth - we're actually pre-integration. Let's call it what it is and work accordingly.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..

Luckily, young people won't have any part of this. Children and youth activists aren't be fooled anymore by adults' frequent insistence that they need to focus on what we think they should. Instead, they are addressing hundreds of inconvenient truths facing our world today in immeasureable ways. And historians like Phillip House have shown us that there is a precident of youth activists doing this throughout American history.

This is Adam Fletcher's blog. Learn more at The Freechild Project and SoundOut websites..