Articles by YouthBuild USA Staff

At YouthBuild we are trying to create an environment in which young people and staff can learn, feel valued and cared for, make good decisions, and grow in their self-development, knowledge, skill, and leadership. Sometimes it seems that there are an overwhelming number of things to do to make things go right. But whether we are in the classroom, doing a rap group, on the work site, or in a Policy Committee or staff meeting, there are a few key processes which always help create the conditions in which groups of people do their best thinking, learning, or decision making.

• Basic Assumptions for Effective Human Leadership
• What An Effective Leader Does
• Some Key Things An Effective Leader Needs to Learn
• Habits Incompatible With Good Leadership
• Rewards Of Leadership
  

The following is a vision of what a well-developed, fully integrated leadership development component might look like.  No YouthBuild program to date has achieved all the elements described in this vision, but everything described here has been used by some YouthBuild somewhere.  Not all these aspects of leadership development can be achieved in the first year. Like a house, a solid leadership development program is built in stages.  However, it is helpful to have a blueprint or vision to guide the stages of development.

As youth workers, our goal is to run a successful program in which young people are respected, their ideas are taken seriously, they are part of the decision-making of the program, they feel cared about by staff and they are learning real and important skills. If we achieve this goal, then, whether we like it or not, the young people will lay in our laps a lot of the pain they are carrying around from racism, poverty and personal family background. It doesn't matter what our official job title is. Most of us will wear the counselor's hat at times.

YouthBuild is not as much about social service as it is about social change.  We think of YouthBuild as part of the broad struggle for human liberation.  So as we immerse ourselves in the daily details of YouthBuild, it helps to keep the long range goals in mind.  As a friend of mine likes to say:
"On foot or horseback, rocketing or rowing,
it helps to give some thought to where we're going!"

Dorothy Stoneman had been teaching school in Harlem since l964.  Some of the children she had taught and loved in second grade in l965 had already died on the streets as young teenagers.  She thought the waste of their brilliance and goodness was a national shame that could and should be reversed. Chantay Henderson Jones was 14 years old in l978 when Dorothy asked her and a group of her teen-aged friends in East Harlem a question:  "What would you like to do to improve the neighborhood if you knew I would do everything in my power to help you succeed?  If  I  got other adults to support you, helped you raise money, and helped you think through the project - what would you do?"

If you think about it, you will realize that except for prisoners and a few other institutionalized groups, young people are more controlled than any other group in society.

YouthBuild’s comprehensive, alternative approach to working with youths has resulted in a low recidivism rate. The organization fosters a strong program culture, providing concrete services, developing positive relationships with youths, creating opportunities for community service and leadership, and establishing a direct connection to the future.

The current conditions and our lack of education about people's history make most young people unaware of the great positive contributions youth have made to changing "impossible" things, both in our own country and in other countries.  Here are a few examples to inform and inspire you, especially when discouragement chips away at your enthusiasm and commitment.

As staff and program directors we are an intimate part of the complicated process of youth transformation.  Like the young people, we are at different levels in our own development.  Each of us has conscious or unconscious aspirations to reach for our highest human potential.  In our heart of hearts, what we most want for the young people we work with is to provide the environment for them to reach their highest aspirations.  When we look back at our own transformations, for most of us there was at least one caring, skillful adult who hung in there with us over a period of time, on whom we relied for some combination of encouragement, challenge, information, guidance, teaching, validation, and love; who believed in us until we believed in ourselves.

YouthBuild is a step toward the long range range goal of fundamental societal change, globally.  For me this will mean the end of all oppression; a just economic distribution of goods, services, opportunities, and ownership; the use of production for real human need, not human greed or unnecessary consumption; the practice of thoroughgoing democracy; the flourishing of human creativity; respect and celebration of cultural differences; the end of violence as a means of solving conflict, whether personal or international; an attitude of lifelong learning; the societal encouragement to explore deeper realms of existence, from inner or spiritual to quantum physics or extraterrestrial.

The world I hunger for is not reachable in my lifetime.  However, what we do in the present greatly shapes the future.