I started working with NYFC Youth Advisory Board (YAB) back in the fall of 2012, when they were undergoing a significant transition period. Here they are almost a year later, with another round of elections under their belt (and thankfully with a codified system for breaking ties this time!). YAB has never lacked for Read more…
Today on the Brian Lehrer Show developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett stopped by to talk about the phenomenon of emerging adulthood. Arnett is the real deal: His research has fueled the study of emerging adulthood and he also tirelessly advocates for a sympathetic regard for millennials and for the expansion of institutional Read more…
Today my advisors and I convened in the “War Room” of AlleyNYC to work through the bones of our pilot program, Multiple Paths to Adulthood. So far the pilot is structured as a three-part program that begins with “Conversations on Adulthood,” a series of sessions that approach the topic of Read more…
On October 11, 2012, BNY Mellon convened community and thought leaders, practitioners, funders, and other stakeholders in the child welfare space for the Powering Potential Thought Leadership Summit. The main topic of concern was how to improve the life outcomes of youth aging out of foster care. They lay out Read more…
One way of articulating what it is that I’m trying to build into a PYA curriculum is the “seeds of self-actualization,” a term I take from “A Theory of Human Motivation” by Abraham Maslow. (Now, I have a terrible blogging habit of burying the lede, so skip down to the jump if you’re already familiar with this.) In brief, Maslow argues that human beings have a progressive hierarchy of needs, beginning with the most basic of physiological drives, moving up to concerns about safety, love/belonging, esteem, and ultimately, self-actualization. Later on, Maslow would sandwich cognitive and aesthetic needs—the pursuits of knowledge and beauty—in between esteem and self-actualization, and top off the pyramid with the search for self-transcendence, or spiritual fulfillment.
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These needs are hierarchical in the sense that the higher needs only typically emerge as each preceding need is adequately satisfied. The higher needs either do not exist or recede into the background for someone who lacks food, safety, love, and esteem. If I am hungry, homeless, and unemployed, I will be preoccupied with securing stable housing and any means of income, long before I might entertain the pursuit of creative expression. And above all, I seek nourishment. Once my most basic needs are met to reasonable degrees, there emerges my thirst for understanding, for beauty, for the meaning of life. (more…)
Yesterday I began an extended program to help New Yorkers for Children‘s Youth Advisory Board define their organization. This is a very exciting time and I feel so lucky to play a part in this process. The YAB has been around for about four years now, but this year really marked a turning point for the group. NYFC’s web site advertises the YAB as a group of high school and college students in foster care who gather once a month for dinner to socialize and help plan events and programs that benefit younger children in care, and also to advise NYFC on the concerns of older students in care. Currently, most (if not all) are in college and are in their early twenties. YAB has largely played a supporting role in events planned by NYFC, but recently members have been expressing an increased desire to plan and carry out their own projects. To help in these efforts, they decided to hold elections for four positions (President, VP, Treasurer, and Secretary), and also to define their own mission statement.
The current version of their mission statement is too broad, so yesterday we engaged in a series of discussions and exercises designed to help them refine it. We began with a meditation on the word community, which they used to describe themselves in their mission statement. We talked about how a community was a group of people that had something in common: things like a geographic location (actual or symbolic, as in diasporic communities), an institutional affiliation (such as a student and alumni network), or even ideas and ideals (e.g., the philanthropic community). Someone added that people in communities also supported each other and looked out for one another’s best interests. What united the members of YAB a community was everyone’s experience of foster care.
To provoke them a bit, I presented them with the argument that YAB was more than just a community, that it was an organization. We talked about the work of community organizers, and through that they were able to define an organization as a group of people who rally behind a cause and work toward goals.
Once that observation had been made, we were able to begin digging into concepts that are fundamental to personal and organizational orientation: values, purpose, vision, mission, and functions. Everyone got a handy graphic tool to help define these concepts. Behold “Mission Man”: (more…)
I’m excited to share with you the overview of the program I’m running for Youth Communication. I’ve put together a workbook for the participants, with activity sheets and space for notes and freewriting.
TRANSITIONS TO ADULTHOOD:
YOUTH COMMUNICATIONS WRITING WORKSHOP 2012
Overview
This sequence of discussions is designed for a group of young people (ages 15 to 20) attending Youth Communication’s 2012 Summer Writing Workshop. In line with this year’s theme of identity, this two-day program gives participants a rich and structured context in which to explore their own passages to adulthood.
The underlying premise is that becoming an adult is not something that happens overnight (on your 18th or 21st birthday), but rather something that takes place gradually and not without some amount of heartache and hardship.
Together we will discuss the concept of adulthood, beginning first with major institutional definitions coming from the legal and scientific fields, and moving through developmental psychology toward cultural definitions in the realms of sociology and anthropology.
The goal is for participants to use this knowledge as a framework for formulating personal definitions of adulthood that resonate in their own lives, and also for generating stories for YCTeen or Represent.
Syllabus (more…)
After reworking my original teen brain workshop for one of my Youth Communication workshops on identity, I realized that it might make sense to link the two versions together as a look at the downsides and upsides of the teenage years. A really good example of the two sides of Read more…
Continuing the thought process from this post, in talking with more and more people about my curriculum, it occurs to me that launching my program ideas is not so unlike getting a dissertation project off the ground. Here are some of the questions I asked myself then, which I am again asking myself as I develop and pitch my curriculum: (more…)
I just came back from a week visiting family, which meant I spent a bit of time explaining what I’m doing with myself these days. I was quite used to fielding these sorts of inquiries as a graduate student, but now that I’m “out in the world” I find I’m having to answer another volley of questions altogether. Namely, family members want to know how I spend my time and what any of this has to do with my degree. I’ll answer the first question of how I spend my time by way of tackling the more difficult question of what a PhD in Spanish is “doing” for my career. (more…)