Ysette

Mentoring youth in care

According to a study by the EMT Group, the national outcomes of youth leaving foster care are as follows:

  • 75% work below grade level
  • 60% of girls have a child within 4 years
  • 50% do not complete high school
  • 45% are unemployed
  • 33% are arrested
  • 30% are on welfare at ages 18–24
  • 26% spend time in jail or prison
  • 25% are homeless
  • 10% are on probation

If handled properly, a mentoring relationship can boost the outcomes for youth who have been in the foster care system. Though results are uneven, researchers have indicated that youth who have been mentored for at least two years between the ages of 14 and 18 are more likely than their unmentored peers to report overall health, and are at a lower risk for STDs, violence, suicidal thoughts, and other dangers. Statistics for participation in higher education and vocational training also seem to promise a significant monetary ROI for mentoring programs.

Here is the caveat you knew to expect: program managers should tread carefully, for a mentoring relationship can cause significant harm if set up improperly. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Modest proposals

I’ve found that the surest way to paralysis at the beginning of a project is to get caught up with concerns of assessment and scalability. This isn’t to say that we can conduct programs willy-nilly. Rather, I think a case can be made for tabling those issues in favor of designing innovative programs that seek to address the immediate concerns of a specific population. Let me explain.  (more…)

By Ysette, ago

New projects on the horizon

I’ve been invited by New Yorkers for Children to run some training sessions with their Youth Advisory Board, a group of young people who are or have been involved in foster care. The YAB is going through a particularly interesting transformation: It started off as an informal monthly social group Read more…

By Ysette, ago

Sometimes it’s surprising what will get them talking

My aim as an educator is to bring about “catch fire” experiences in the classroom, so to that end I try to make my material engaging primarily to myself and then to the students. Yes, you read that right: teacher engagement is the sine qua non of successful learning. (One of the worst courses I ever took was taught by a professor who regularly used to pull lecture notes from a filing cabinet that was decades old and read those notes as a lecture during what was supposed to be a discussion-based seminar.) (Of course—and pardon me as my parenthetical asides multiply—we’ve all suffered at the other extreme where the teacher is so obviously fired up about a subject that leaves the entirety of the class cold. Teacher engagement is a necessary but insufficient condition for successful learning.)

I’m disentangling myself from parentheses to bring us back to the point I really want to make, which is that sometimes I take risks with material that I consider vital to the discussion even if I fear that students will have to slog through it with a little less enthusiasm. What I thought would be the necessary evil in my Transitions to Adulthood program was the opening unit on legal definitions of adulthood. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Framing questions

The two questions that run through all the units in the Transitions to Adulthood program are:

  1. What is an adult?
  2. How (and when) do you become an adult?

I like to put those questions early on to the group as a way of placing on the table early on many of the major points that will surface over the course of the program. In addition to these two questions, I also asked the group where they got their ideas about adulthood, since for some reason they were reluctant to mention it during the ice breaker/word association exercise.

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By Ysette, ago

Adult vs. not adult

I began the first day of the Transitions to Adulthood program with a word-association exercise around the concepts of “adult” and “not adult.” Here is what the YC group came up with: You will notice that, by and large, the column of “adult” characteristics is overwhelmingly positive, whereas the “not Read more…

By Ysette, ago

Transitions to Adulthood: 2-day program for Youth Communication

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…)

By Ysette, ago