I can check another item off my bucket list: leading a workshop at a staff retreat! (Old readers may remember when my dream of leading workshops at a youth retreat came true.) And what’s even better is that I just found out that the audience will be a mixed group Read more…
So I wasn’t even a full twenty four hours out of my retreat when I was hit by the spiritual equivalent of a Mack truck. Funny how these things work. I had ideas of easing back into things, but the Universe decided to dish it out all at once. My Read more…
Carrying so much sadness today, so I am especially thankful for good news. An email from Maurice letting me know that he got into NYU put a great big smile on my face. Here he is at the Centre for Social Innovation. He looks right at home! Maurice, you wrote Read more…
(Jermaine will be very pleased to see that I’m not reposting the same old photo I kept using of him from last year’s YAB retreat.)
Jermaine and I first met in September 2012, when New Yorkers For Children engaged me to work with their Youth Advisory Board. This past September he and I began working more closely through Emerging Leaders and together we determined that he would work on three areas for the 2013-2014 school year. Specifically, Jermaine would make an effort to:
Believe it or not, he hit it out of the park with all three by the end of February. This year he has been a strong and consistent voice in Emerging Leaders (you can read about that here), and he also brings that same presence to his work at YAB.
Jermaine has also put a lot of effort into bringing together his great respect for the creativity of young people (including his own interest in music) with his commitment to finding meaningful work and gainful employment not only for himself but for others. He has honed his vision for a program that will help launch young people into creative careers. He also took full advantage of the connection I facilitated to a youth development organization called Building Beats. The folks who run it couldn’t be more thrilled with the operations work he is now doing for them.
Let’s talk about goal number three, though, because learning to ask for help is no small feat. (more…)
In this same workshop we also revisited the topic of brain development. We reviewed the difference between the prefrontal cortex or “White House of the brain,” which has the ability to plan for the future, and the amygdala or “reptile brain” that reacts instinctively in fight/flight/freeze fashion. This helped to introduce Read more…
I’ve been in transition for so long now that uncertainty and discomfort had become my life’s norms. How strange to be able to look back on a year and notice the extent of my transformation. Where once was a void, there now is a path. No doubt, I am still trailblazing (can I say trailblazing even though it still feels like bushwhacking?), but now I can clear the way for longer stretches at a time. If I had to distill 2013’s biggest lessons into pat formulas, I would say they were:
1. When facing your fears, the immediate objective is not to become “good” at something, but to become better at being a beginner. (more…)
Credit: Lindsay Adamski
If you want an inside look on how I develop my material and roll out new workshops, here is a case study. Last Sunday several members of NYFC YAB, accompanied by Lindsay Adamski (a.k.a., ladamski), joined me at AlleyNYC for a four-hour project management bootcamp. (Yes, you read that right: four hours on a Sunday. It was their suggestion. They are intense, these folks.) The aim was to finish the work that we started at the retreat back in August on the YAB Project Management Manual, which like their constitution, is co-authored by YAB and me. My model for this was the OCFS Handbook for Youth in Foster Care, which incorporates the voices of young people in care in every chapter. I especially liked how the handbook defines terms using the words of youth in foster care.
YAB does a terrific job of referring to a printed copy of their constitution during their meetings, and the manual is definitely supposed to act as a guide for every step of the project management process: brainstorming, project selection, planning, execution, and ending (termination, completion, and administration). Each section has handy tools and tips for success. We’re also making it available in digital format, however, because the manual is intended as a living document that they can edit over the years by modifying, clarifying, and elaborating on the existing material (e.g., working out their own ground rules and processes for each of these stages). There are exercises sprinkled throughout, so it also served as a workbook at the retreat and at the Alley bootcamp.
Full disclosure: the first project management workshop was a little rough. In a strict sense I wasn’t disappointed, though, because as with any new workshop, I was prepared for some kinks. (It’s always tough to time new activities.) Furthermore, it was the last workshop on the final day of the retreat, the youth were kind of restless and burnt out from all the work and running around we’d already done, and the creepy cabin we used as a classroom (the “dead animal room”) was not conducive to thoughtful dialogue. I’d assumed that we would finish the chapter on brainstorming rather quickly, but it took us an hour to get through the material. Nothing was too trivial for debate, and in my effort to write down everyone’s opinions, we lagged behind schedule.
It was clear that I had to recalibrate my approach (in business parlance, “pivoting” after “failure”!) for the follow-up session. This was a team effort. Lindsay got feedback from YAB about what they thought could be improved for next time, and the two of us met to discuss some tactics. Here are the ideas we all came up with: (more…)
[For Dale—again—whom I miss something fierce] So today is a bit unusual (though I wish more days were like this) because I’m spending a good portion of it with a bunch of young adults. I have five people coming in (and one person Skyping in over his lunch break) all Read more…
[For Candice and Nahjee] I wish you ladies could have joined me for Lisette’s talk, “Multi-contextualism and the Consumption of Higher Education,” because I know both of you would have really enjoyed it. Giving you a digest below. We can dig into all this more deeply when we see each other next, because I would love to hear your reactions.
Lisette made a very credible case for the dishearteningly low college graduation rates of the latino student population being a result of certain cultural pressures rather than a lack of academic preparedness. In other words, it’s not that latino students aren’t capable of hacking college-level courses; it’s the fact that within the latino community young people take on very adult roles within their families, and this sense of obligation—and very real responsibility—often gets in the way of attending to the competing demands of college life. If we understand young latinos’ desire for parental closeness and their role in contributing to the family income, then all of a sudden the phenomenon of high-achieving latino students dropping out of selective colleges in order to attend the community college close to home makes sense.
What enables Lisette to arrive at these insights is by considering the problem of college persistence through the lens of multi-contextualism. (more…)
It would take a long paragraph to list out all the awards and honors that Nahjee has won, but I won’t go into any of it here because I’m convinced that the foundation of a positive self concept is not built on the external validation you get from jumping through Read more…