Youth Development Insight

By Dylan Kelly Imagine for a moment being 16 years old and reading the latest climate change article shared around social media . How would you feel? What thoughts would you have about your future, society, and your place in it? Would you feel anxiety? Would you be motivated to take action? Climate change and its impacts are a major concern for young people. A recent survey of students at one Maine high school found that 58% think about climate change daily and 48% want to engage in organized environmental action around the issue. Youth are thinking about what climate change means for their future and they want to be change agents. So what is our role as youth workers in supporting their goals? Environmental action: How change happens Environmental action involves deliberating, planning, implementing and reflecting on a project or action to achieve a defined environmental outcome. The focus is not on youth changing individual behaviors (e.g. turning the lights off when leaving a room...

By Trudy Dunham Facebook changed its policy for teens last week. In the past, teens' posts could only be seen by "friends" and "friends of friends". Now, they can designate their posts for public viewing. Does this matter? Should teens have the same privacy, or lack of privacy, rights as adults? There are concerns about what this will mean for teens. Will this policy change further compromise their online safety? Will the impact of cyber bullying, its frequency or severity, increase? Will more young people jeopardize their educational and career futures by "unwise" posting of images, opinions and links? Will marketing become even more focused on youth, as information about their likes and activities are harvested for more specific ad targeting? And does it matter? All these are possible and may even be likely outcomes of this Facebook change in policy. It raises the risks to youth who use social media, and youth who just know teens who do. B...

By Deborah Moore From Occupy Wall Street to government and campus protests, to overthrowing leaders -- there is definitely something happening with youth today. I remember sitting in a class last winter watching a live link to the protests in Egypt and feeling like the world had shifted. So much has happened in such a short time, and youth are playing an important role in it. What does that have to do with youth programs? Perhaps everything. This statement by Shannon Service in YES! magazine sums it up for me "After three decades of dormancy, youth activism is again flowering. But today's flower children are a hardy new variety. They're economically, ecologically, and electronically sophisticated. They're also globally organized, dead serious about democracy, and determined to have more fun than their opponents." So my question to all of us is this: What are youth programs going to do to respond? I think the answer may lie in engaging youth in ways we ...