Today I received another spectacular question from Jackie, an executive director of a nonprofit focused on youth involvement in the Northeast. Reflecting on the Freechild Project Measure of Social Change Led By and With Young People, Jackie made an important point about this work:

...[I]f our goal is “all community members equally make decisions, take action” can it come from an effort initiated by an adult, like what I’m trying to do? I like the quote from Lilla Watson, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up in mine, then let us work together.” I’m afraid maybe what I’ve organized is trying to “help” youth. Do you have time to share any thoughts?

I had to mull this over all afternoon, and honestly I'm not fully satisfied with my resolution - I think there's more here. But here's how I replied:

All adults have a moral and ethical responsibility to engage young people throughout the communities we co-occupy. It is true that we mostly fail to live up to that standard; however, that does not make it okay or right. We live in an adultcentric society that is reliant on the ideas, knowledge, and actions of adults to make the world turn; by deliberately setting about engaging children and youth in equitable and sustainable roles we can begin to rectify the disengagement we so regularly thrust upon them.

In consideration to Lilla's quote, we must measure our responses in a responsible fashion. When I first read it a long time ago I internalized it, thinking that my inability to bring actual students into the state education agency I worked in was a failure to students and myself. However, I have come to understand that systemic change requires that adult allies assume responsibility for advocacy in the absence of youth themselves. I learned to talk with students directly by traveling around the state and going to schools and having safe and supported conversations with them about school improvement. I then took their words - directly, without my interpretation - back to the agency in their absence. When space was created within the agency for young people I had students I could go directly to, who I knew were informed and engaged in the lives of their schools as well as the language of school improvement. This led to their self-representation being a sophisticated contribution to these opportunities rather than bringing under-informed, under-prepared and frankly, disingenuous student voice into the room.

I say this at the risk of sounding as if I'm trying to rationalize away the selective inclusion of youth; however, I think that there are appropriately varying responses that need to be considered according to particular circumstances. By "selective" I do not mean WHO; I mean HOW. We don't give 16 year olds the keys to the car and expect them to teach themselves how to drive; we shouldn't do that with Youth Voice. This is particularly true when we consider the implications of youth involvement: its about efficacy as much as rights. We know that children's rights and youth rights conversations generally don't carry a lot of water in organizations and agencies today; however, we also know that school improvement and program efficacy are important throughout our communities. So let's qualify and quantify youth involvement, if that is what is going to get young people at the table. In order to deliver on that, though, we must be very intentional and deliberate.

It is alsincredibly important to acknowledge that the nature of the quote has to do with the difference between sympathy and empathy. By differentiating ourselves from the young people we serve by dissing our actions we are merely perpetuating the "otherness" of youth. Unfortunately, I am convinced this is the silent messaging of a lot of programs that promote the perception that young people have the program within them. Ironically, this further strengthens the segregation of youth, which in turn enforces the alienation a lot of young people feel from adults, effectively undoing any notion of civic engagement and community building we thought we were encouraging through that approach in the first place. Now, please don't get me wrong - there is a place for young people to run their own activities. However, I think that is a compromised position, at best, particularly when the work is in context of improving our whole communities and not singularly the lives of children and youth. If we are to address community problems what is a more effective, equitable approach than engaging all members of that community as partners? That includes children, youth and adults.

I guess to sum it up Jackie, at the end of the day I am a proponent of a radical democracy that sees the youngest among us as the logical engines, advocates and allies - just the same as everyone else. Full support, full opportunity and full inclusion are the only outcomes that I will accept; however, I know that the road from here to there is bumpy, unscripted, and sometimes isn't a road at all. That's why your work is so important.

I would love to hear anyone else's response to Jackie's question or my response.

After spending three years and 100s of hours on the cause I am wrapping up my time served as a-lot-of-time Wikipedia editor. Contributing as "Freechild" and a few anonymous IP addresses, I have created more than 400 articles, including dozens about the issues I originally explored on the Freechild Project website. Following are some of those topics listed for your easy reference and contributions. Please make Wikipedia better by getting in there and monkey-wrenching around yourselves - and don't be shy! Want to know how to write a good article, defeat an "article for deletion" proposal or find references about obscure topics related to young people? Respond to this post!

Here's a list of some of the articles I created on Wikipedia about topics focused on young people:

Issues

• Adultism
• Evolving capacities
• Intergenerational equity
• Student voice
• Youth-adult partnership
• Adultcentrism
• Fear of youth
• Fear of children
• Youth politics
• Youth leadership
  
• Youth development
• Community youth development
• Positive youth development
• Youth voice
• Youth activism
• Youth participation
• Youth empowerment
• Youth-led media
• History of youth rights in the United States
• List of youth topics
• List of youth empowerment organizations
• Youth development
• Children's rights
• Timeline of young people's rights in the United States
• Timeline of young people's rights in the United Kingdom
  
• Youth program
  
• Youth council
• Youth philanthropy
• Youth leadership
• Youth engagement
• List of children's rights topics
  
• List of youth rights topics
  

• Global/National Youth Service Day
• Youth Activism Project
• Youth On Board
• Youth Service America
• National Youth Leadership Council
• American Youth Congress
• Black Association for Nationalism Through Unity
• Youth Innovation Fund
• New York School of Applied Philanthropy
• Child Welfare League of America
• National Network for Youth
  

Individuals

• Wendy Schaetzel Lesko
• Mike Males
• Henry Giroux
• Dennis Harper
  
• Grace Llewellyn

Other stuff

• Category:Youth empowerment individuals
• Category:Youth empowerment organizations
• Category:Youth councils
• Category:Youth-led media
• Category:Youth development organizations
  

This list is a lot longer, but honestly I don't want to keep looking right now. Let me know what you think, and again, please let me know how I can support YOU contributing to Wikipedia!

All of the readers of this blog likely rank as "well-meaning," in the sense that none of us wish ill in our work with young people. Now, its true that I hold some people in contempt of violating that trust, either consciously or unconsciously. Rather than being as bold as I was last week, I want to step tepidly in the following pool. By doing this I am simply attempting to create a dialog, rather than launch an attack; I regard people practitioners and proponents of child-friendly environments as allies, and nothing less.

Yesterday I introduced the topic of Child-Friendly Environments, these conscientious attempts at creating physical spaces and social places where young people are acknowledged as the full-fledged humans they are, with distinct needs and desires that are valuable in creating positive, healthy, and supportive opportunities for their growth. This work is going on in cities and nations around the world. Today I want to introduce the flip side of that coin.

In my study of this topic I have discovered a continuous undertone that implies that children, particularly the youngest ones, are incapable of rendering their own judgment about their environments. Its this sentiment that drives many parents and childcare providers to develop "cutesy" rooms where child psychologist-approved colors, shapes, sizes, heights and activities create a safe, nurturing space that allows "kids to be kids." The dilemma of this approach is that inherent in it may render the opinions, ideas, knowledge and actions of children as nil. In this way creating child-friendly environments may deaden Youth Voice.

Its for that reason that I would challenge any well-meaning adult ally to young people to consider creating "child-friendly" environments that move beyond Internet censorship or healthy snacks, whether or not those are valid elements. Instead, I want to encourage all of us - myself included - to adopt a wider-reaching set of principles designed to guide all elements of our societies. The United Nations suggests child-friendly environments:

1. Reflect and realize the rights of every child;
2. See and understand the whole child, in a broad context;
3. Is child-centered;
4. Is gender-sensitive and girl-friendly;
5. Promotes quality learning outcome;
6. Provides education based on the reality of children’s lives;
7. Is flexible and responds to diversity;
8. Acts to ensure inclusion, respect, and equality of opportunity for all children;
9. Promotes mental and physical health;
10. Enhances teacher capacity, morale, commitment, and status;
11. Is family focused, and;
12. Is community-based.

This is a reasonable start. I would emphasize the first element, that of children's rights, among which the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child includes Youth Voice. Only by taking such an assertive stance can we move past the adultism inherent in much of the development and implementation of child-friendly environments, particularly as I've known them in the U.S. and Canada. There is a logical connection between this work and that of today's youth advocate: let's create the space to collaborate.

Over the last several years my research on Youth Voice has consistently led me to the doorways of a body of work referred to as "child-friendly environments". This phrase has been applied to a wide variety of elements in the lives of young people, including the physical, structural and cultural surroundings where children and youth spend their time.

Adjusting the physical apparatus of homes and schools in order to make them more easily accessible to children and youth seems to be the main concentration of many conversations about child-friendly environments. I have seen topics include:

• Providing a stool for children to stand on in the kitchen.
• Putting a coat rack at kids' height by the door so your child can get her own coat and hang it up when she comes in.
• Creating a reading nook with a beanbag or cozy little chair next to a shelf of his own books (more later on encouraging reading).
• Hanging art at kids' eye level throughout the house
• Placing mirrors at kids' height so they can see themselves.

These steps are among many that Montessori and others proponent for creating environments that foster independence and worthiness in the eyes of children. Learning environments outside of schools, including museums and libraries, are wrestling with how to create child-friendly environments, too. Ensuring books are physically and intellectually engaging for young people has been a mission of many libraries since the first children's book sections were created in the early 1900s; the questions today go much further. They include:

• How can young people make meaning out of a one-way presentation of facts?
• Where do young people get to apply what they learn in museums?
• Who do young people turn to in order to learn new facts?
• Why should libraries or musuems continue to exist in the face of new technologies?

Major themes in this area have been identified as location, the way young people interact with the things to learn, and the way that information is structured to present to young people. There are also a number of other ways a child-friendly environment is created, especially the speech, appearance and interaction young people have with adults. At home this can look like parents being home with their families, providing a safe and supportive environment for children to play, learn, grow, thrive and explore who they are, where they are from and how they interact with the world around them. My own experience has shown me that parenting is one of the most powerful ways to engage Youth Voice in our communities. UNICEF has done a great deal of work in this area, and their work on promoting child-friendly schools warrants applause; others have taken on this area, too. Other places include police departments, hospitals, and entire child-friendly cities. Jackie Naginey Hook, the executive director of Child Friendly Initiative, has talked with me in some depth about her work in State College, Pennsylvania, doing this right now.

The term "child-friendly" is abused, as well, as many marketers and others interpret "child-friendly" as anything that is entertaining, amusing, or otherwise fluffy and fun. This notion of childhood is nothing less than infantalizing, and it stigmatizes the very notion of what it means to be a young human being in the world by not allowing young people to be more or less than a commercialized version of themselves. However, less nafarious but more impactful is the abuse of this term in its daily usage by even the most well-intentioned adults.

This brings me back to how child-friendly environments relate to Youth Voice. Without expanding this post further, let me tease at what I'll write about later: Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child acknowledges the rights of all young people to have a say in anything that affects them. Where does that figure into a world that adults routinely construct for children and youth, without children or youth?

In my continuing saga to rid the world of the crass commercialization of youth and the marketing of homogeneity, I would like to bring your attention back to YPulse. As some of you remember from my other forays into this conversation, I've got beef with people who sell youth, sell to youth, and promote the manipulation of Youth Voice as a marketing tool. I stand against the commercialization of childhood and youth-dom, and YPulse, along with several other blogs, does this very thing with exacting science and precision analyses. Frankly, I am scared of the power of Anastasia Goodstein, its founder and operator.

Goodstein has shown deft skill at defining and driving youth consumption, particularly as it relates to popular culture and technology usage. She is joined by a small bevy of other bloggers* * * * who do this for a living, and honestly they all have their interesting moments. But Goodstein's successful marketing of herself as the Carrie Bradshaw of teen marketing is what puts a briar in my britches. Profiteering off mass explotation bothers me - call me particular that way. Perhaps what bothers me most is that it appears that Goodstein got her start from a righteous place: she started her work at Teen Voices, a Boston nonprofit youth media organization. Bleh.

Oh, and let me be clear: this isn't just about the blogs. Goodstein has a book, as well as several conferences every year. More than a half dozen other other youth marketing conferences* * * apparently want to grow up to be half as influential as Goodstein. Her website is up there, too, ranking 171,334 in total popularity across the Internet. That's compared to the Best Buy Corporation's @15 website, which competes with the nonprofit YouthNoise, and ranks in at just over 10,389,000 in popularity. These say nothing of the beer-promoting websites Goodstein also promotes on her youth marketing blog* *. Classy.

Admittedly, there is a lot to learn from what the Youth Voice marketers have done, as well as their analyses. DK, a thorough social marketing maestro from the UK who routinely brings his expertise stateside, is one of the people in this area I watch closest. I readily credit his Mediasnackers with teaching me a great deal about my own work, even if - or especially because - he is a marketing expert. The difference between his work and Goodstein's, though, is that from DK I get the sense that there is a genuine commitment to actually bettering the lives of young people through better marketing. With Goodstein, not so much. I get that it is about bettering the lives of the marketers involved, rather than the people they're targeting.

Let's remember why Youth Voice matters - because it comes from young people and benefits all of us. In this same way I would challenge many youth marketers to remember why their work matters - because it benefits more than them individually. As Dr. King implored us, "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity." Let's keep that in mind no matter what our angle is.

Announcing a new resource for Youth Voice activists and practitioners around the world: The Freechild Project Youth Voice Toolkit! The Toolkit includes:

• Youth Voice Glossary
• Assumptions about Youth Voice
• Principles of Youth Voice
• Keys to Youth Voice
• Cycle of Youth Voice
• Guidelines for Youth Voice
• Honoring Youth Voice
• Youth-Adult Relationships Sprectrum
• Cycle of Youth Voice
• Discrimination Against Youth Voice
• Myths About Youth Voice
• Youth Voice Assessments

There is also an extensive collection of resources and other tools. Explore it at http://www.freechild.org/YouthVoice

"I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is vertical, so it's humiliating. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people." - Eduardo Galeano

Eight years ago I met Heather Manchester, who introduced me to the Eduardo Galeano. A radical activista from Oakland, Heather had worked in a number of organizations, including AmeriCorps, in the Bay Area of California before taking the position of YES Ambassador with Youth Service California. That's when I met her. Joining with her and Mishaela Duran, we formed a contigency carrying on a minor tradition of critical thinking in youth involvement that was started a long time before us. Our work during that time was't easy, and between the three of us connections were tight, along with several other Ambassadors, including LaNovia Meuse and Gina Zanin. Later Heather helped me form The Freechild Project, and has served on the Advisory Board since then, along with Mishaela and LaNovia.

Since then Heather has continued to expand her commitment to social justice, youth empowerment and freedom for all people. She worked with the Oakland School District for several years, including work as a Disciplinary Hearing Panel Case Manager and as a case manager at the ROOTS International Academy. Heather has been working for restorative justice in all of her work, and her efforts have been recognized.

Recently Heather moved to Derry, Northern Ireland, where she's completing graduate studies in peace and conflict studies. Heather Skyped me this weekend, and after talking for two hours she sounds excellent. Better yet, she's discovering the broad extent of youth action in Northern Ireland. Here are some links I found for her; feel free to make any suggestions! Oh, and Heather's still committed to Galeano's notion of solidarity - and thanks to her, I am learning, too.

• Youth Action Northern Ireland
• Youth Work Training Board
• Youth Service Liason Forum
• Participation Network
• The JEDI Initiative
• NcompasS

Waiting for a young person to fail before engaging them in their own education is a terrible route to finding your voice. Allowing young people to use drugs, letting them drop out of school, watching them tear themselves and their lives apart is messed up. And yet when I talk about reaching youth and connecting them to our programs I'm thinking about these young people. That's because the programs I have worked in - including suicide prevention, adult living skills, mentoring and recreation programs - have led me in that thinking. When I began working in the national youth voice movement I was almost immediately steered away from those youth, and I found resonance with people who bucked that thinking in order to work with youth who were like me when I was a kid, including my friends Mishaela Duran, Heather Manchester and LaNovia Muese.

Shhh! I found something out today from my colleague Annie Blackledge... it turns out there is a very sophisticated conversation going on out there about "rethinking prevention" and involving youth in decision-making that affects their lives, and that conversation has nothing to do with our international conversation about youth voice, youth involvement, etcetera. It turns out there is science and law behind this model. While I'm not ready to promote it as the end-all-be-all (there may be issues that I haven't found in my preliminary scan) I am ready to say that "Response to Intervention", or RTI, may be a model that we all need to explore, in order to identify its implications for our work. A dilemma is that RTI's premise might scare a lot of people these days, especially after the last eight years of No Child Left Behind. That premise is that we allow data to drive our programming with young people. The secret here is that a primary data source in the RTI model is... youth themselves.

What if we actually engaged youth in determining the success of every single intervention we were attempting in their lives?!? And I'm not just talking about surveys every month. Instead we're looking across the spectrum of their analyses, including attitudinal measurements, participation in cultural activities, emotional responses, and other data which has been historically left up to adults to determine and collect. The essence of RtI, from what I can tell so far, is that youth themselves have the primary role in this collection. This flies in the face of traditional youth development programs that rely on adult perceptions of youth needs in order to design the activities. The model also contradicts youth prevention programs that rely on young people doing "bad things" before they got involved. That's because instead of focusing on just the "bad kids" RtI examines the views and perspectives of every youth.

RtI looks like it has been important in special education [PDF] and working with emotionally disturbed youth. I'm sure there's already a conversation out there about moving RtI into the mainstream. Also, I'm sure there's a conversation out there addressing critical concerns, too. I want to see both of these - if you know of them please share.

• Here's an exhaustive list of writing about Response to Intervention from Wrights Law.

I think I've mentioned the new series on youth activism coming out from the Capstone Press? Last month I finished consulting on a four book series for middle school students, each focused on topics like social justice, the environment, and animal rights. Well, I'm excited to note that I just found out that McGraw-Hill, a major publisher of school curricula, has devised part of a classroom lesson plan based solely off The Freechild Project website!

In five questions students are asked to read through the site and vital the answers to a variety of questions, including...

• What is the Midnight Forum and what does it use hip hop to do?
• Why do older adults and teens make good allies?
• What are some examples of ways students can get involved in the decision-making process at their schools?

This type of exercise does a few things for Freechild: first, it legitimizes the intrinsic value teachers find in the website by enshrining it in curriculum; second, it legitimizes the value students place on the website by engaging them in using it within the formal boundaries of the classroom. While its true that there also drawbacks, I think the usage is primarily positive.

Find the entire plan here. And please let me know how YOU are using Freechild in your classroom or youth program. Thanks!

Mike Males is a sociologist and author whose writing has deeply influenced a lot of radical, committed youth workers, myself included. As my own analysis has opened up I've continued reading Males, primarily because he keeps digging further into the psyche of adultism in America today. His writing is powerful, as he continuously drills into the heart of the hypocrisy, alienation and cynicism that drives our society's treatment of youth today.

Recently I visited his site, YouthFacts.org and learned another handful of reality. But perhaps the most poignant summary of his writing is his essay called, "America ’s news media—a cesspool of anti-youth misinformation". That's how Males tells the truth - straightforward, brutally honest and incorruptible. Thanks for doing what you're doing Mike - we all need your guidance.