Verde Smoke

[Week 4: 03/12/08] Why is my strategy like a Tootsie-Pop? My reflections this week will be both around my project’s strategy [candy shell] and my own “meta” strategy to work with these youth [chocolaty center]. Thus, I have two organizing statements: (1) On the surface, I’m organizing a leadership team of YouthBuild Lawrence youth to stop the pollution of community spaces but really I’m (2) starting with a small group of youth in Lawrence to raise their voices and call for change in their community.

I bring this up, because I’ve gotten more crystallized in the last week that I need to leverage the current reactive, direct service strategy of YouthBuild’s current programs into a more proactive and empowering ORGANIZING strategy. The organization draws on the resources of AmeriCorps and their staff to improve the individual situation of each of its participants, working against the challenges each of them has faced as drop-outs, teen-age parents, and/or court involved youth. With incredible fraternity, this program fosters the motivation youth have to change themselves as participants in this program to create change for others, by building affordable housing or doing typically one-time community service projects. But my goal now is to get them thinking about ways to change others, not just their selves, to create more sustainable change in the community. The example I used today in our leadership meeting was: “Yes, you could team up and go pick up all the discarded fridges every week. But what happens when you can’t anymore? Will that change people’s behavior or the circumstances and values that lead them to liter this way?”

We’ve just begun to think about our first strategy to act on this issue, but I’ve been employing a bit strategy to work on my amorphous meta-project, youth empowerment. The leadership team is trying to meet twice a week with me, for the last 1-2 hours of their work day – this will evolve next week when I’ll take more of a step back to go away break. I’ve employed some tactics to establish relationships and frame their roles as leaders and mine as just a resource. I also, unfortunately, benefited in my timing as I pushed to get more formalized in our meetings right around the time when the group was in personal crisis and looking for concrete ways to be productive. Finally, I’ve been targeting the discussion toward moving away from a topic [Lawrence is dirty] to a problem [pollution as evidenced by big liter in parks, parking lots, and the river], to an issue [the City doesn’t collect these items and people can’t afford (or are too lazy) to dispose of these items on their own].

Unfortunately, last Friday’s team meeting was pretty painful to live through, but I think it laid the way for the more productive meeting we had today. On Friday, because of some scheduling issues, I only was able to convene four of the eight members who had expressed interest in serving on the leadership team. My first mistake was to pack the agenda full of too many steps. The second mistake was to do all this before getting all their individual values and interests on the table. The final mistake was not creating a shared set of expectations about what the group hoped to do and prioritizing a discussion on how they want to make decisions as a group. We tried to break down the three issues that had surfaced in the big group discussions (pollution, police corruption, and discrimination in Section 8 housing) into the needs, values and interests behind them, but the discussion quickly polarized into interest groups and the group couldn’t even agree to vote.

So today, I changed gears and the whole group was in attendance. I asked them to take a step back and first decide as a group how they are going to decide on things as a group (silent vote was the consensus…how do you vote on how to vote?). The big breakthrough came when they agreed that when a vote was cast, that not only the proponents of an idea would move forward with it. One member’s analogy was “get on the bus or it’s leaving without you.” Then we created list of group expectations and we all signed it to seal the deal. Finally, we agreed to take a few minutes on our own, write out the top things we value, and share a few with the group. We created a diagram with many of our shared values (family, education, health) and posted it on the wall beside the expectations. Then we discussed the problems and honed it down to the real issues. I asked the two most outspoken members to facilitate and find ways to get others opinions. The group left on-time, agreeing to talk to at least one person outside of YouthBuild about the issue. The atmosphere was much more convivial because we actually accomplished our goals for the meeting…and the candy I brought didn’t hurt either.

[P.S. Yep, this is way too long and late, but Wednesday afternoons are when the action happens! An in response to last week’s comments – Of course I’m telling my story and sharing my values! For a good peak at my usual “spiel”, check out a blog entry from my second year of AmeriCorps VISTA.]