New York City is home to a spectacular and burgeoning youth rights movement, and one of the leaders sent me an email the other day. She asked, "How did you come to be involved in youth rights, and what made you decide to put Freechild together? What originally got you inspired?" Following is my answer. Warning: This post is about my personal life, because this has always been a personal labor for me. If you don't want to know, don't read. Otherwise, welcome to some of the life of Adam.

I started getting paid to work with young people when I was 14. That year I was hired to teach in a summer drama program in Omaha, Nebraska based on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. I had a great mentor for the next three summers, when I worked for the city's foremost African American director who was called Edu Mahili. He was a radical activist who'd channeled his energy towards liberatory self-expression, and his effervescent charisma drew in some tough kids in the neighborhoods where we worked, and I became smitten with the notion of working with young people for all my life. Over those same summers I worked at a camp teaching nature, and throughout the school year I struggled through classes and tried my damnedest to make sense of the schooling that was being done to me.

After I graduated from high school I wasn't quite sure what my next steps were. I eventually got jobs running ropes challenge courses, teaching independent living skills to foster and homeless youth, monitoring the youth floor in a drug treatment center, and working as a full-time teacher/naturalist at a nature center in the Midwest. I spent three terms as an AmeriCorps Member, first putting together a mentoring program for Kurdish and Iraqi refugee students in Nebraska, then running a year-around ropes challenge course in the Pacific Northwest, then coordinating a service-learning program in Northern New Mexico. In that last placement I had a position in a federal government program intent on training the next generation of national service leaders.

As I was finishing that position I learned about The Evergreen State College in Olympia, where degree studies are self-driven, and I decided I needed to come here to finish my BA. I had attended six colleges up to that point, and had to more to go before graduating, but ended up earning my degree from TESC. Around 2000 I was running a city-funded youth center in Tumwater, Washington when I stumbled across Jonathan Holt's Escape from Childhood in the local library. I immediately ingested several of his books, and while they didn't really stick to my ribs the same way "Escape..." had, I became determined to proponent children's rights as he called for them. I dug around the Internet and quickly became interested in NYRA and other online youth rights efforts. I quickly wanted to become involved in NYRA - especially since it seemed "newer" and fresher than other orgs.

That year I was hired by a national foundation based out of Washington, DC to proponent youth involvement in Washington state. They provided me with train-the-trainer training, along with a "reasonable" framework for advocating youth voice, focused primarily on service learning, youth councils and youth forums. Working out of this state's education agency, I traveled around the state finding youth involvement that resonated with my personal experience, including low income youth, homeless kids, and young people of color. I found it - although it didn't look like what I'd learned about. When I brought back examples of radical youth participation to this foundation I was told they were nice, but "not what we talk about." Chagrined, I went back to the state ed agency. In my spare time after work I worked with a group of friends from around the country to pull together The Freechild Project, so-named by a group of young people who I'd hooked up with here in Oly. They were focused on youth rights, and I wanted to tie together youth rights and youth involvement, so it felt like a logical fit. While that group fizzled after a few years, it supported a lot of the initial labor behind Freechild. My comrades in this work helped me a lot, too, encouraging me to expand my analysis further. With their guidance I quickly identified elements of familiarity among the youth rights, community youth involvement, student engagement, youth philanthropy, youth-led media, and hip hop movements. I started leading workshops in communities, conferences, youth orgs, and other places across the U.S. with financial support from the groups that hosted me. These events, along with regular emails, books sent in from authors and publishers, and my constant vigilance for developments across the Internet led to the rapid expansion of the Freechild Project website and helped me understand the breadth of youth power today. It still amazes me.

Eventually I started talking about youth involvement within the state ed agency. Why not have young people involved in the place that affects them everyday - schools and education leadership? They ended up hiring me as their first-ever "student engagement specialist," and eventually I developed SoundOut from that work - but that's a different story. Freechild continued to grow and expand because of my friends and the young people I keep meeting. Also, it has been great to get support from people like Henry Giroux, who is a serious academic who seriously supports Freechild and myself. Constant contact with individuals and organizations around the country and the world only encourages me, and I continue to want to grow Freechild further.

That's how The Freechild Project was created, and where it is professionally sourced. My core inspiration? That goes a little further back still, past the career and swagger. My youngest years included homelessness and poverty, along with some bumpy school experiences that centered on the inability of teachers to reach me and my siblings, all of who were gifted learners who needed to be reached in specific ways that schools were incapable of doing. Along with that were experiences of trying to found an environmental club at my high school over 3 years, and having no reception from administrators or teachers at the school - despite participation from dozens of my peers and stated support from community members. There was volunteering for the food bank and local housing agency, and working as a janitor, warehouse worker, and roofer. There were crappy experiences of watching family and friends get swept away from school and our neighborhood and being thrown into jail, into parenting, the military, and minimum wage jobs where they still struggle. I wasn't a ruffian looking to squabble on every block, but I was a rogue, a tagger and a smack-talker who tried a lot of different means to reach the ends. All those things inform my work still, and always will to some extent. And my struggle isn't done: I have a 4 and 1/2 year old daughter, and she's keeping me in check in a lot of ways - that's for sure.

Note that I ended this story right around 2002 - a lot has conspired since then. Feel free to ask more.

The United States is a backwards democracy. Rather than distributing the power to all of its citizens, it throws it into the hands of the few. Instead of bringing opportunities to the under-resourced, it lavishes chances upon those who already have access. In this post, I am concerned most with the reality that instead of engaging its youth in democracy, the US is most focused on engaging its middle-aged and seniors. That process is languishing.

For more than a century children and youth across the country have called for active roles: They have protested as suffragettes, lobbied in Congress, marched against child labor and sat in for civil rights. They have led Internet campaigns, political campaigns, Amnesty International campaigns and anti-war campaigns. While the adults who ally with them have been exceptional (Mother Jones, J.D. Salinger, Tom Hayden) the young people themselves have made huge strides for young people and for the communities they represent - even if they are unacknowledged for their contributions to society. When was the last time you heard of the American Army of Two, Joseph P. Lash, Barbara Rose Johns, Billy Wimsatt, Alex Koricknay Palicz or Tully Satre?

In the meantime there is growing international support for youth involvement, youth voice, youth activism and youth rights. Instead of being an occasional, one-off activity or an underfunded, underutilized grassroots movement, these efforts are systemic, operationalized and powerful. That's not always good - but its a completely different place than exists in the United States.

Almost all of Europe has young people participating and represented by the European Youth Forum. In 2006 I talked with one of the founders when I was at a Brazilian youth conference in Sao Paulo. While he was older, it was awesome because he was one of the founders. Think of it: having opportunities for 50-year-olds to actively advocate for young people, youth rights, youth involvement and other issues all of their professional career. Even if that's not attractive to you, what if it was just an option? The National Youth Council of Singapore is almost 20 years old; the Sangguniang Kabataan of the Philippines is more than 15 years old. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which acknowledges and extends all of the areas we're interested in, has been signed into law by more than 190 countries around the world! As I've said before, the U.S. is one of two countries that haven't signed it. This nation doesn't really see Somalia as good company to be compared to in international relations , does it?!?

The United States is no country for young people, and that has to change.

Here's my answer to an email I received today.

In our town this spring there will be three public issues forums/town hall meetings and we want to include youth voice. Two forums are on youth and alcohol and the third is on public education. In your experience, does it make sense to include youth in these forums or to hold separate youth-only forums?

The following is my response:

About the youth-exclusive versus adult-inclusive forums, here are my thoughts:

1. Create the climate. Its all about creating the climate reflecting your expectations for the forum. Regardless of whether you do or do not integrate youth and adults, you must make clear to all participants that you are striving to create a safe, inclusive environment - but before you do that you must actually think about what that means, particularly in comparison to what young people experience everyday. You know, the houses where parents encourage kids to be themselves and then frown when their teen goes goth. The schools where teachers preach to students about preparing for the future and then ban them from accessing the Internet. So create the climate that will engender the experience you want to foster.

2. Consider the essentials. Who is coming? What is allowed to be said - both overtly and subversively? Who is listening? Before you begin consider all the questions at http://soundout.org/framework.html

3. Examine the messages. What is communicated to a roomful of youth who have one adult at the front attesting to adults wanting to listen to youth voice? What is communicated to a single youth member of a BOD when the adults there say they value -all- youths' voices? There are a lot of messages communicated intentionally and unintentionally, and we have to be aware of what is said.

4. Consider the outcomes. If you have a roomful of adults listening fishbowl-style to a group of youth those adults are going to be free to dismiss or ingest any one part of the experience however they want. If you have a roomful of youth with ten adults circling them those adults won't get authentic voices, and if they do they may feel able to censor and edit at will. I mean, there is a lot of nuance and consideration here, but the point is what do you really want to see happen from the event. I would suggest that the most authentic dialog between youth and adults happens in small group settings - 6 to 8 participants - with one or two adults. There should be a technological recording apparatus that avoids adult or youth filtering what is said, along with individual note paper where participants can take their own notes.

5. Make accountability priority. I think that our society is so imbalanced because of the amount of accountability with foist onto young people - succeed in school, stay out of trouble, don't stay out after 11pm, etc. - without any mutual accountability for adults. That's not to say youth should have a say in setting adult curfews; rather, when was the last time students could hold their teachers accountable for failing to teach them? When was the last time youth could hold their parents accountable for treating them unfairly? And so forth.

So I didn't give any direct answers; rather, I encourage people to consider their own specific needs for the activities they want to embark on.

Hey there kind readers. Just thought I'd let you know that these last few weeks have been full of transitions as I decided to move back to Olympia from New York. So I have wrapped up my work with Learner-Centered Initiatives, started a fellowship with Cloud Institute, donated all of my NYC furniture and drove solo back to Olympia over the last 3 1/2 days.

I am still determined to land work within another organization. Thoughts of consulting, writing and training fill my head like sugarplums in Xmas songs, but I just don't see any "bread and butter" work coming through right now, so...

I've begun the job search here, and its interesting, to say the least. I've been labeled overqualified for several positions now, particularly in organizations that have training positions for their curricula. I think there's concern about my allegiance to someone else's work - but I'm not completely clear on that. On the other hand, the state jobs I've applied for, namely program manager-type work, has deemed me too inexperienced in handling large budgets or risk-management assessments. I did get back in time yesterday for an interview with a national organization based out of Portland where I could work here in the South South, so... we'll see. If you know of any opportunities let me know.

Alas, I'm back on the corner, and that's the important part for me. I am commited to raising my daughter in a healthy way, and in being close to the friends and community that have nurtured me so well. I am looking to reconnect and strengthen my relationships, so if any of my local hombres are up for tea let me know.

Special thanks to Margaret, Jimmy and Sue who all asked where my blogs are at - look for more soon. I'm thinking of touching on several risque topics within the next week - keep reading.

What does it mean when youth voice programs send young people into situations where we know there are hostile adults or complex problems that need preparations that young people don't have?

Recently a close friend told me about a situation where her brother had the opportunity to speak in front of the city council about homeless and foster youth, which he had experienced. Rather than his program spending any time preparing him to speak strategically about his experience they let him go and talk. You know, they patted him on the back when he went up and said, "Good job!" when he was done - but honestly, he flew off the handle. Scrambling around his emotional landscape this young advocate poured his life's experience on the floor. For some reason the program that brought him trusted that to be enough for him to have a positive experience, and they trusted the city council enough to make sense of his testimony and let it inform their decision-making.

I would wager that the city council was dismissive of him, at best. Its relatively easy to simply listen to youth voice, and then congratulate ourselves for that effort. Rather we need mechanisms in place that ensure the engagement of adults and youth in response to those voices. That's what I try to illustrate in my Cycle of Meaningful Student Involvement - I just don't know if I succeed.

Oftentimes I fall back on the metaphor of the 16-year-old and the keys to the car: We don't just give a youth who wants to drive the keys and allow them to barrel down the Interstate at 75 miles an hour, and we shouldn't do that with youth voice, either. Unfortunately I'm afraid that is also an excuse to simply dismiss youth involvement as needing too much work, but hey...

Let's stop handing out just enough rope for young people to become sacrifices on the alter of youth voice. We have an obligation to do more than that.