The youth voice movement of the last twenty years has been more problematic than practical for the majority of individuals and organizations involved. Despite good intentions and high-minded ideals, few youth voice initiatives have found a way to integrate and sustain youth involvement and action over the long-run. So many of the youth councils, youth-led evaluations, board positions for youth, and other special accommodations have come and gone, leaving confusion, frustration and resignation in their wake.

Today I write this in remorse of the recently-announced end of the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction's student engagement office led by Greg Williamson. For the last three years Greg has been pounding his feet on the street trying to get students and teachers across Washington State to simply listen to and consider what students' perspectives about schools and school reform efforts are. After slugging it out in 100s of schools with thousands of students and adults, Superintendent Terry Bergeson has pulled the plug on Greg's effort.

This is after I've seen a dozen other experiments and projects and processes similar to the student engagement office fail over the last seven years. Its gotten to the point where folks simply dismiss it as part of the process - "These things come and go" - and then we move on. There are so many problems with that thinking, not the least of which being the fact that once those programs are gone, YOUTH ARE STILL AROUND.

That's the great challenge of our work: To redefine our society beyond special treatment and interesting ideas. We have got to change the ways people think and feel in their everyday work, because when the programs end, those people are still there. Youth are still there. And their younger brothers and sisters are still there. What is next?

Marketing is a disgusting beast of an animal that sucks the souls of humans to feed the beast of greed. Marketers created "youth", inclusive of the developmental stage of life and the social notion of a certain way of being. Now that it exists, they relentlessly sell it: shoes, music, clothes, body styles, education, and of course, culture.

Anastasia Goodstein is the author of a new book called Totally Wired, and the editor of YPulse.com. She watches youth, watches marketing, and tells marketers a lot about youth. Somewhere in the midst of all that there might be something good, but I have always come up short reading her. From the gist of it all I get is that she's another lens through which marketers can observe youth.

That said, today I offer insight from the "Dark Side" - the Land of the Marketers. In her blog Goodstein explains that she was recently at a youth marketing conference - you know the kind, where hungry dogs saliva all over each other waiting for the latest news they can use to lure in their prey? Goodstein was there and collected a bunch of the latest marketing research. I think their statistics might tell us a lot about the future of social change led by and with young people in the United States. Let's take a look:

• There are 800,000 new teens each month. The total teen population is 33.9 million (12-19 yrs)
  
• Purchasing power from 1990 to 2001 amongst teens has increased 189% in total. But between ethnicities, there's been a 457% increase among Hispanics, 431% among Asians, 251% among blacks, and 176% among whites.
• 46% of Hispanics in US are under 25
• "Chill" is the top attitude/lifestlye teens associate with at 40%. Others include Urban (23%), Prep (23%) and Hip Hop (19%)
  
• African Americans and Hispanics use social networking sites more than whites (both at 84% vs. 81%)
  
• Music as defining their identity (44%), with family a close second (39%)
  
• Surprisingly high disdain for brands. 56% see them as creating negative stereotypes. But it's totally love/hate: "infatuation tempered with contempt."
• 20 million teens 12-17 are online. That's 83% penetration which will grow to 88% in the next few years
  
• 75% of teens that are online use social networking sites
  
• MySpace is the #18 ranked youth brand, ahead of iPod and Nike
  
• MySpace teens spend more time online (9.8 hrs) than watch TV (9.2 hrs)

According to Goodstein, the statistics came from Radha Subreamanyam of the N, a youth TV station, and Michael Barnett of Fox Interactive, the web-based side of that media monster.

What can these statistics tell us? These marketers have access to broad numbers of diverse young people, and their outcomes are tied into their statistics honesty - so I'm not sure that the numbers tell us any lies. But without making crass generalizations or cynical indictments of capitalism or consumerism, what is the lesson for youth programs and organizing campaigns and anyone else who cares to look? I think there may be gold in those mountains, and I'm gonna look. What do you think?

"No, I thought my program was the only one doing that!"
"There is no way that foundation will give us that much money."
"They wouldn't know which way is up if we hadn't told them."

Everyday youth voice programs act in autonomy. Each one acts as if it was the only youth voice program in its city, or the best youth voice program ever made. Now, both of those are may be true - but rarely so.

I have found a lot of reasons for that kind of thinking. Competing for grants and public sentiment are two glaringly obvious excuses; high self-esteem and "competition" for youth are other reasons. All of those may be valid reasons - but they may not be, as well.

One way to get an idea about what is going on around you, and to develop strong new partnerships and make in roads, do a community-wide youth voice survey. Begin with having a group of youth conduct a community-wide youth voice survey. Remember - a community can be a school building, a neighborhood, a city, or a region. Following are five steps to make that happen.

1. Gather together a small group of youth and/or adults who are committed to engaging other youths' voices.

2. Give team members access to resources where they can learn about youth resources in your survey area. That might include the Internet, phone books and any resource guides that already exist. Make sure everyone is familiar with the tool in front of them. If no such tools exist in your area, be prepared to do door-to-door surveying of actual locations that may be potential harbors for youth voice.

3. The team should develop a working definition of "youth voice" that will allow them to identify where youth voice happens throughout the community. CommonAction defines youth voice as the active, distinct, and concentrated ways young people represent themselves throughout society.

4. Identify everywhere that definition exists throughout your community. Collect all locations onto one central "map", either literally in the form of a map or in a list, etc.

5. Team members should analyze the value and depth of the youth voice throughout your community, and use this data to create a realistic, practical and need approach to youth voice in your community.

Last night I had coffee with Shannon Stewart, the rawk star brainstorm behind Seattle's VERA Project and the new All Ages Movement Project. As we talked, I had a moment of clarity that I want to share. When I get excited I talk a lot, and Shannon was a gracious and flattering listener - it was cool. But when I finally shut up, Shannon began to talk. Almost immediately I was reminded why we'd spent so much time talking together on the phone, and it reminded me why I was so excited to sit down with her: Shannon "gets" it.

I've talked about this phrase a lot with the youth in CommonAction's workshops. "Who gets it?" "What does 'it' mean?" "What does it take to 'get it'?" The answers are either as vague as I'm being on that day, or as random as the group of youth is - and it seems sometimes like every group of young people has the capacity to be completely random. Sometimes "it" is a list of characteristics, and that list can get long. Sometimes "it" are "types" of people, and sometimes "it" is just a feeling or intuition.

But "It" must be something more, and when I was talking with Shannon, I think I found "It" again - different, but the same. But now I'm not sure.

Send me an email or reply to this blog and tell me what you think we are talking about.

Many people want young people to feel connected and enthusiastic about their communities, their organizations or their learning. However, there is a large segment of the population that simply do not know what to do when it comes to meaningfully and deliberately engage youth in a sustainable way. For those folks, their best intentions are sometimes undermined by their own ignorance.

Now, this list is clearly a farce, and I am not serious. However, instead of naming names and showing the ugly side of Freechild and SoundOut's work to the world, I thought this would be a safer, more just way to show that sometimes youth engagement dies. These are just some of the ways that happens.

The following are 10 ways that you can kill youth engagement.

10. Make decisions for youth without youth. Rules? Program themes? Evaluation topics? Activities? If you want to really disconnect young people, make as many decisions for them - without them - as possible. BONUS STRATEGY: If doable, have children and youth in the room when you make decisions for them.

9. Be the designated driver. Somebody needs to tell youth what to think and where to go - why not you? Simply whisper in the ears of children and youth as frequently as possible, or when there is a loggerhead, see strategy #10.

8. Filter what is said and done. Don't let your perceptions of young peoples' inability and lack of knowledge get in the way of the group! Step up and say for children and youth what they can say for themselves. BONUS STRATEGY: Tell them that you don't believe they can speak for themselves, and speak for them.

7. Throw them into the fire. Don't teach children and youth about the issues they are supposed to be addressing, or about the possibilities they might not know about. Instead, simply take 'em outta the pot and throw them into the fire.

6. Defeat young people behind their backs. After young people have attended and participated, and once they leave the room or the program or the class, simply refute everything they said. Explain that you do not have the time, patience or interest in what they say, and work to undo everything young people said or did in a deconstructive, anti-collaborative fashion.

5. Privately deny young people. You can do this overtly by saying things to the effect of, "We don't want to hear from you right now," or, "Kids are better seen and not heard." BONUS STRATEGY: When young people speak up or show up, stand in front of them or speak over them - no matter the time or place. Show your adult power and gloat to young people about your power as often as possible.

4. Sabotage young people as often as possible. Once children and youth have experienced successful activities or outcomes from initiatives where they engaged, go behind their backs and undo everything they did. You connect with other adults better than youth - show that! You know they system better than those kids - act like it! You can vote, drive, go to movies and generally do whatever you want to without fear of status offenses or adult retribution - show that!

3. Publicly deny young people. After children and youth have been successful creating change or transforming cultures, stand in front of the TV cameras and microphones and refute their actions. Go to parents and teachers and youth workers, politicians and officials and others, and explain to them that "those" youth were wrong. Be adamant, show evidence and research, and simply exert your strength and willpower over the actions of youth.

2. Manipulate youth - and then tell them. Now we are getting really dastardly, and anyone who does these things should wear a mustache like Snidley Whiplash. First, lure children and youth into your activity by promising them rewards like class credit or cash. Then squeeze their words and actions out of them: Have them write a book, lead a course, facilitate a conference or some other such thing. Then, when its all said and done, tell the young people that you simply used them to fulfill a grant objective or assessment item! Mo-ha-ha! BONUS STRATEGY: Tell them what they did does not really matter, and then see Strategy #3.

1. Punish young people for becoming engaged. It sounds preposterous and self-defeating, and maybe that the point! As soon as young people become enthusiastic and connected to the task at hand or goal in mind, explain that they should not be so connected. After they spent all morning on the bus to get there, then they get there, tell them you are not going to meet today. When young people finish, take their accomplishment away from them by letting it "rot on the vine". Show children and youth that caring hurts, and act like it.

I just read an article about Wilton High School in Connecticut. Students there worked with a teacher to write a play about the Iraq War, which got squashed by school administration before it was put on. Most of the response to this travesty has been about free speech and anti-war rhetoric, all of which is fine. But I think an important point is being avoided.

For too long mainstream American media (and many so-called progressive sources, too) have painted young people as apathetic slackers, as inclined to whittle away the hours thumbing their text messages as they are to watch Paris Hilton make a public ass of herself. Pundits and politicians paint youth to be ignorant demons, crazed with guns and ex while their both their parents are slaving away at work. These same young people fail standardized tests designed to help them; they greedily consume tax dollars with their public schools and healthcare needs, and they ingest media like consumer drones without brains for themselves.

In the aforementioned article journalist Amy Goodman, who I respect for her commitment to justice in the media, contributed to this damnation in her own way. Rather than portraying her subjects as the powerful drivers of their own learning - which they are - she showed them to be simple, easy-to-understanding psuedo-actors on the road of experience upon which so many of Goodman's readers and viewers have already walked. This is the regular treatment of today's young people by the elder generation: condescending, belittling and particularly facetious when it comes to the activism, action and learning demonstrated by youth today.

Unfortunately, this criticism comes most loudly from people who I think should be supporting today's activists the most. In 1971 a fifteen-year-old in Ann Arbor, Michigan created a publishing group called "Youth Liberation", committed to sharing the tools and powerful words young people needed to create radical social change in their neighborhoods. Keith Hefner would run that group for eight years, and then go to New York City where he would found Youth Communications, a powerful and effective foster youth voice program serving thousands of young people every year. Sounds like a reasonable candidate for supporting youth action, right?

Wrong. In the year 2000, a banner year filled with the creation of Billy Upski's Active Element Foundation and the National Youth Summit in Florida, Hefner pounded out a turn-of-the-century-defining article railing today's youth for having no "mass-based movements of young people struggling for social change." That is despite the thousands of young people rallied around Active Element (and its current offspring, Future 5000 and the League of Young Voters). That is despite the thousands of youth leaders who showed up in Orlando that year.

Hefner continued, saying "There is little organized political work among youth from the left or right, either youth-run or adult-run." Remember, this was the year 2000. It was only a few years before that Al Gore invented the Interwebbernet, and because of that, groups like the National Youth Rights Association and AtTheTable were pulling together efforts - online - that were powerful and awesome. Others existed in that same period that were equally astounding; but maybe those missed Hefner's radar.

Hefner is not alone in the "old hippies" anti-youth of today movement. Todd Gitlin, a once-leader of the still-influential Students for a Democratic Society, thinks so little of today's youth activists that he thought to write a snide, cynical diatribe against young people, wryly entitled book called Letters to a Young Activist. He is so disenfranchised by his named audience that he actually has the gall to write in the Introduction,

"You agree to indulge my lecturing on matters I didn't quite understand until I was older than you, and I make every effort to connect to your passions and objections... even though you're too young to have had the experience I draw on."

Thank you, Mr. Gitlin, for that smart way of drawing in your young readers. Certainly now anyone who is forced to read your book by a sadly lost college professor will feel better about reading it.

Frankly, I'm tired of the convenient youth-bashing. I'm disgusted by the unethical, incongruent, disingenuous "reporting" that highlights falsehoods. I'm revolted by the masked ephebiphobia and the sly adultism of lawmakers, coupled with the wholesale abandonment of today's children and youth by voters who refuse to fund the public schools their children relied on to become... SUV owners. I sick of the blame and retribution of police officers and the neglect and abuse of young people foist into homelessness and foster care systems that do nothing more than perpetuate cycles of neglect and abuse... I sick of hearing again and again that "youth are the future", "I believe in children", and "I vote for the kids" when nobody - no b-o-d-y - behaves as if young people are RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Somethings gotta change. Amy Goodman, please tell the story differently next time. Keith Hefner, write an update, a real history of youth rights from today's real perspective. Todd Gitlin, come to the Puget Sound and I will take you around for YOU to listen to young activists - because it's obvious you need to. Let me know if you need some reading, and I'll put you onto Henry Giroux, Mike Males and Robert Epstein, all of whom have the verbiage you might need to understand. Oh, and let me tell you some stories - check out the Washington Youth Voice Handbook, to begin with.

Let's all do something to really change the world - together. Let's stop bashing young people.

This is the CommonAction blog, covering The Freechild Project and SoundOut. Learn more about CommonAction.

One of the realities of youth work is that the subject of your work - young people - leave. They move on. Because of their positions in the world, because of their interests and responsibilities and obligations and ideas, they simply go on with life. What happens after a youth has left? Teachers might bask in the bright afterglow of a spectacular student or class, youth workers might feel good about a completion or transition. What about everyone else, the young people who left other ways? The ones who finished with a fizzle, or dropped out, or simply left before it was "time" - meaning the time adults defined. What about them?

Somehow they leave their mark, too. Its rubbed off on me more than once, particularly in my critical lenses. The unfortunate reality of these young people is that their absence, their departure is not their responsibility, per se. Rather, it is a community responsibility, a reflection of the inabilities of the institutions and people within them that were designed to garner their participation in the first place. For every dropout there is a failed teacher; for every walkout there is an inadequately designed program.

Oh, I know the stories we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better, largely because I listen to them and feel them myself. However, I also know those are merely the salve we put on our wounds. I remember the times, particularly when I was new in this work, when seeing a young person walk out was heartbreaking. Somewhere along the way a boss told me not to worry about it, and a co-worker laid out a dozen reasons why that person left.

But we hear from youth long after they're gone, whether we want to or not. Like some kind of undealt-with trauma from a war ill-fought, we've got these battle scars that make us think a little different, act a little different, and be a little different than we were before. That's the nature of this work, and we're like the soldiers. And all that says nothing of the young people themselves, nor does it say anything about ourselves when we were young...

It almost sounds like the name of an organization - Adults Advocating for Youth Voice, or AAYV. As a 32-year-old who has been involved in both "sides" of advocating for youth voice - both as a youth and as an adult - I am particularly aware of the tension involved therein. I've written in this blog quite a bit about that tension. So I'm sensitive to charges of inauthenticity, particularly when they're lobbed by other adults.

Last week I was in a meeting where an adult went on a tangent about youth leading their own movement, and adults standing aside to let young people through. I raised an objection about the disingenuous nature of that argument, primarily because we live in an adultcentric society where young people do not have grassroots access to the skills and knowledge they need to change the adult-driven systems that affect them most.

This person turned on me and launched into the problem of me and "people like you". According to them, my "hogging" the spotlight without "making room" for youth to lead "almost singlehandedly keeps the youth of our state" from being effect change makers. It sucks hearing that kind of accusation from anyone, particularly someone when I admire their work.

So today I'm taking stock and making choices. I've been working with a small legion of people over the last year to grow out CommonAction and make some vital choices about the future, but now I've got something else to consider. Always with the changes, this work comes...