Working With Youth To Create Stories For Youth
~ By Jasmine Rose
Personally, I have always been intrigued by the power of sharing one’s life journey as a means of self-growth, reflection, and empowerment. When youth share their personal life stories they can send strong messages to their peers, parents/guardians, communities and society as a whole, while also showing the unique gifts, talents, and perspectives youth provide.
I was very excited to get a chance to ask Keith Hefner about his agency, Youth Communication. The Prevention Researcher has had a long-standing relationship with Youth Communication and decided to share this agency’s unique mission with our readers: to help teenagers develop their reading and writing skills so they can acquire the information they need to make thoughtful choices about their lives. This blog is the first of two. Next week we’ll get a chance to read what Mr. Hefner says about engaging youth in developing their reading and writing skills.
Jasmine Penter: How do youth first become connected to Youth Communication?
Keith Hefner: Our goal is to provide information to “at risk” or disconnected youth, to encourage them to do more reading, and to provide them with accurate and helpful reflections of their lives and concerns. To do that requires having writers who are struggling with the same issues as the readers. And that means we have to make special efforts to recruit those kinds of young people, since many of them would not naturally gravitate to a writing program. We do that in several ways.
First, of course, we promote the program as a way to have a voice, and that brings people in the door. By the time they realize how hard the writing is, they are already committed.
Second, we cultivate relationships with referral agencies and schools that serve some of the toughest kids—alternative and “second chance” high schools, foster care agencies, employment programs for marginalized youth, etc.
Finally, many teens who come into the program report that they read an article in the magazine and that it helped them, and they think they have a story to tell that will help someone else. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the work—the fact that so many teens join the program out of altruistic reasons. (And it is wonderful to reach teens when they have that impulse and give them a concrete way to express it. I am convinced that one reason so many of our alumni go into teaching, social work, activism, and other “helping” professions is that the experience of writing a story that generates a grateful response from readers is very rewarding.)
Jasmine Penter: What are ways your staff engages youth when building rapport with them?
Keith Hefner: The main way we build rapport is through close listening and a kind of humility—and really striving to hear what is most important to them. We liken this to a kind of code breaking. Teens don’t just spill their guts about what is important to them. Rather, they drop hints to see if the editors pick up on them. When they see that the editors are noticing the right things and asking appropriate, nonjudgmental follow-up questions, trust grows.
Building trust is also important because every story we publish goes through 5 or 10 or sometimes 15 or more drafts. Young people will not stick with the process unless they trust the editor who is guiding them. In addition, many teens write about powerful emotional issues—such as the death of a parent, recovering from abuse, discovering their sexuality, etc. The teens won’t open up to the editor unless they trust that the editor will be sensitive to their feelings and ideas, and can help them make sense of those experiences through writing.
However, the main goal is to create a story with the power to move a reader. Teens bring their ideas to the process. The editors have expertise in how to convey ideas. The rapport that develops between the teen and the editor is not based on “pleasing the teacher,” as happens so often in school. Rather, it is based on the understanding that the teen and the editor are working toward the same goal—to create a story with the power to inform and move a reader. It is at the point when the teen is neither trying to please the editor nor engaging in an ego battle over the editing, but instead is working with the editor to learn the skills she needs to convey her ideas that rapport truly flourishes.
Jasmine Penter: While many of your programs are focused around youth, we see you also have parents/guardians involved in the Rise magazine and with some of the smaller projects. Can you further describe some of the work you do with parents/guardians that has made an impact?
Keith Hefner: Interestingly, we began our work with parents involved in the child welfare system over the objections of many of the teen writers. But once we started publishing stories by parents, the teens were fascinated by them. Most teens in foster care want some kind of relationship with the birth family, but at the same time they are very angry with them. For many of the teens, it was a revelation to see that parents who had done horrible things were not necessarily evil. In fact, many of them had been abused themselves as children and never learned how to parent, or even to respect themselves.
Our parent’s column evolved into Rise, which publishes a magazine, a website, and curricula by and for parents who are involved in the child welfare system. Rise has published three curricula based on parents’ stories, on relations between birth parents and foster parents, issues related to reunification, and parenting skills. They are already being used by child welfare agencies in prevention programs, parenting classes, and the like. [Note: Because Rise works primarily with adults we recently spun it off to become a separate organization, http://www.risemagazine.org/.]
Don’t forget to check back next week for part two on engaging youth in developing reading and writing skills.
About Keith Hefner: Keith Hefner founded Youth Communication in 1980. Prior to that, he published a magazine and a series of books on youth issues. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989, and he was a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of New York City at Columbia University during the 1986-87 academic year. In 1997 he received the Luther P. Jackson Award for Educational Excellence from the New York Association of Black Journalists. For more information about Youth Communication visit www.youthcomm.org.
