Principles 14 страница

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valuable organizational resources and who will not. Also, if recruitment brings in candidates who do not have the potential to assume effective organizing roles in social action campaigns, then turnover will be inevitable. A pattern will develop whereby greater resources are used up in the initial phases of organizing, creating a shortage of resources for equally impor-tant phases that follow. And this misallocation of resources will prevent the later phases from occurring in a deliberate and strategic manner.

Recruitment of youth organizers is a labor-intensive process, and this is to be expected regardless of the region of the country or whether the locale is urban or rural. One organizer gave the following advice:

Visit local hangouts and places that youth go, good or bad (schools, parks, basketball courts, liquor stores), to talk about your program. Know what you’re talking about. Don’t dominate the conversation. Ask youth for their opinions, and listen. Be well prepared—bring flyers, brochures and signup sheets. Follow through. Send letters to every person you contact inviting them to a meeting. Call those who don’t show up to let them know they were missed, and let them know about upcoming meetings and events. (Alexander 2001, 6)

Alexander’s (2001) description of this multifaceted, interactive method of finding potential youth organizers certainly does not fit well with those who hope to recruit simply by putting up posters and sending letters to orga-nizations that can feed youth to them. That approach may be successful if young people already are connected to organized groups, although we have our doubts if that is ever the case. However, this book focuses on youth who are disconnected, and in order to attract these individuals, recruitment must have an educational quality that can be offered only through personal dis-course and all of the other elements associated with this type of activity. The relationship-building process continues through all of the other phases of youth-led organizing.

Methods

Staples (2004a) strongly suggests that an organizing committee be formed to lead and coordinate any systematic recruitment effort. An organizing committee (OC) is a working group (typically twelve to fifteen people) who provide direction and leadership for the general recruitment effort or or-ganizing drive. The committee gives visible legitimization to the organizing effort, actively recruits new members, helps neutralize potential opposition, begins to define the first issues, and provides an initial leadership core that works together with the organizers to build the new grassroots community organization (GCO). It is critical for committee members to develop a true sense of loyalty to and feel ownership of the organization. They should have an ego investment in its success, actively promote the effort, and defend it if questioned or challenged by various opponents.

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Once an organizing committee is in place, a variety of recruitment meth-ods may be employed depending on the particular circumstances of the community. In addition to the types of street outreach that should be done wherever young people tend to congregate, as described by Alexander above, face-to-face recruitment may be carried out through knocking on doors, home visits, one-on-one meetings, house meetings, and talks to captive audiences— that is, gatherings where youth already are present (Staples 2004a). Presen-tations to such assemblies have the advantage of reaching a large number of potential participants with a minimum investment in time. However, the quality of such interactions usually is minimal, given both the limited de-gree of engagement and the brevity of the contact. Nevertheless, this problem is easily remedied by using sign-up sheets to secure the names of attendees interested in finding out more about the organizing effort. Follow-up re-cruitment then can take place through subsequent home visits or one-on-one meetings that provide an opportunity for in-depth conversation.

House meetings are small meetings (typically five to fifteen attendees) that may be held at someone’s home or in some other familiar, accessible, and agreeable space where participants feel welcome and comfortable. These low-quantity meetings provide an opportunity for high-quality interactions to take place, since there is extensive discussion about the organizing ini-tiative and an opportunity for those in attendance to ask questions and express their opinions. Getting people to the house meeting can involve street outreach, knocking on doors, captive-audience presentations, net-working, electronic communications, word of mouth, invitations from or-ganizing committee members, and other means. Further, house meetings provide an opportunity for training emerging leaders as well as serving as a forum for discussing and testing new ideas (Staples 2004b).

Focus of Recruitment

What types of young people tend to join youth organizing campaigns? Why should they join such a campaign? These certainly are fundamental ques-tions, and the answers are as wide-ranging as there are social-change ini-tiatives, as is noted by one evaluator (Murashige 2001, 12):

When we interviewed the participants, the list of reasons they gave for checking out their organizations was long and varied. Some joined pro-grams to escape the boredom of school or a particularly nasty teacher. Some had older siblings that had been involved before them. And still others were actively looking for something ‘‘political’’ to do, having been motivated by a teacher or adult earlier in their lives.

Youth who have a spark about them tend to be present at these pro-grams. This profile is true, even for young people who may not be doing well academically and may feel trapped in their school or community by lack of viable options (Sherwood and Dressner 2004). One Boston youth

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organizer, when asked who joins and stays in youth organizing programs, noted (Sherwood and Dressner 2004, 53):

The ones who are most likely to stay engaged over the long term are the ones who are the most needy. The ones who are having the hardest time in school are also the ones who have the most family problems. They see and understand opportunities that are there for them and take ad-vantage of them. They have potential but have never been engaged in their schools. The bottom line in what we do is about power—how to achieve it and reach it and create it and shares it. The ones who come in feel powerless, and then understand that they can have power; it clicks for them.

This young Boston organizer touched on a host of instrumental, ex-pressive, and informational needs that are met by participating in youth organizing. Clarity and an understanding of the factors that motivate young people to become engaged become very important during the screening, training, and support/mentoring phases of a youth-led organizing cam-paign. When youth feel good about their involvement, they spread the word and become key contributors to an organization’s recruitment drive. The legitimacy that young people bring to this phase plays a crucial role in con-vincing others that becoming an activist can be a win-win situation for them, their families, and their community. Participation rates in grassroots com-munity organizing do not differ significantly by age. According to Staples (2004a), it is a realistic goal to involve 10% of potential activists in most community organizing efforts.

And, mind you, most young people who participate in community or-ganizing will not select this field as a career. Such an expectation is unre-alistic for any age group, and it would be unfair to apply it to youth. A different perspective is in order: every youth who gets involved will benefit personally and also will become a more informed and active member of society. Thus, the engagement of young people in community organizing is a win–win proposition from society’s perspective! Some youth not only will display a talent for this activity but also will develop a strong commitment to work that promotes social and economic justice. For them, this field represents an unlimited potential for involvement, particularly when they focus on marginalized groups in society.

Based on an extensive evaluation of the Youth Leadership for Develop-ment Initiative (YLDI) funded by the Ford Foundation (Wheeler 2003), re-search found that civic activism was a successful approach for recruiting and engaging young people who had disconnected from conventional youth-development programs. The chance to reflect on their lives, having space to focus on better understanding their culture, and realizing voca-tional and leadership opportunities all became attractive options condu-cive to participation. Youth-led organizing is one, highly visible choice that

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combines possibilities for personal growth with opportunities to achieve positive community change (Cutler 2002; Huber et al. 2003).

Wheeler (2003) and others are quick to point out that paying stipends or wages to young people for their participation is considered an impor-tant element in recruitment. Essentially, this practice ‘‘professionalizes’’ their roles in the group. It also helps organizations to hold youth organizers ac-countable for their actions in a fashion similar to how adult staff members are answerable for their organizational functions. Although some in the field would argue that paying young people to participate effectively en-ables the sponsoring organizations to control their actions, the benefits of payment far outweigh the potential downside from a youth and community capacity enhancement perspective.

The youth development field has been quick to recognize the potential role that communications technology (see chapter 8) can play in recruiting young people while also providing competencies that can transfer to school and career arenas (Delgado 2002). Beyond its actual use as a recruitment mechanism, communications technology can be an attractive inducement for engagement. For example, young people may be drawn to an organi-zation for its opportunity to use and learn technologies that may not be readily available in school or at home.

Ultimately, most organizers, regardless of age, agree that addressing the salient issues for youth is the best recruitment strategy (Staples 2004a). What makes a good organizing issue? Good issues build organizations by attracting participants. They must appeal intensely to the self-interests of a significant number of people, and in order to do so, they need to meet several criteria.

Perhaps the best test of a self-interest issue was established by Saul Alinsky (1971), who argued that the issue must be immediate enough for people to care deeply, specific enough for them to grasp, and winnable or realistic enough for them to take the time to get involved. To the extent that an issue can meet these criteria, it will have a strong self-interest draw with the potential to attract large numbers of people. The most compelling issues will have wide breadth of appeal while also engendering a significant degree of depth of interest and emotional intensity. Therefore, it is crucial that issues be framed or cut in a manner that maximizes their attraction.

It is necessary to create multiple points of entry into an organization in order to attract young people with different interests, talents, and back-grounds (Beyond Base 2004). Successful organizing campaigns need a team of organizers with complementary talents, interests, and abilities. Of course, maintaining this team balance requires that special attention be paid to recruitment. Given the fact that turnover is inevitable in any organizing effort, especially in youth organizing where activists age out on a regular basis, recruitment should be carried out almost as a full-time organizational activity to maintain the requisite flow of potential youth organizers to fulfill the multiple roles associated with social action.

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Screening

Screening, like recruitment, necessitates that sponsoring organizations take a broad approach to determining who should play a role in youth orga-nizing and what that role ideally should be. The primary functions of a screening phase are to ensure that organizations select youth candi-dates who best meet organizational needs and to highlight the candidates’ strengths and areas for improvement. How these functions get assessed varies widely depending on local circumstances (organizational and com-munity).

Variability is certainly the name of the game in youth-led community organizing. However, as London and Young (2003) note, certain consider-ations, such as heavy reliance on written applications or formal interviews, must be taken into account regardless of local variability. These methods can effectively screen out potential participants because of past negative experiences with such formal mechanisms. Further, reliance on a minimum grade point average can be a barrier: using grades as a criterion may effec-tively eliminate good leaders who have not done well in school for a variety of very good reasons. As a result, rigid screening criteria are never advis-able. Flexibility, however, requires that those who do the screening have clear ideas about who is it that they seek to involve in their campaigns. Dif-ferent types of campaigns may require different youth competencies. The screening function is just as important as the recruitment one because it sets the stage for preparation. Lack of clarity in this phase makes the prep-aration phase all that more difficult.

Screening is best viewed as consisting of nine categories, depending on the goals of the group: (1) youth goals and motivation; (2) emotional ma-turity; (3) time and geographical availability constraints; (4) potential con-tribution to the campaign; (5) interpersonal and relational skills; (6) social-demographic profile to balance the organizing team; (7) time commitments and length of participation; (8) leadership potential; and (9) age and length of time before aging out of a youth role. The weight placed on any of these categories will vary according to organizational and local circumstances. Nevertheless, all of these categories must be taken into account during the screening process, in addition to other possible considerations unique to the sponsoring organization.

There certainly is no model for screening youth organizers that enjoys uni-versal acceptance. Generally, the screening process consists of three stages. The initial stage attempts to assess the candidate’s experiences, expectations or goals, assets, and needs. The second stage usually involves a group interview consisting of youth members of the organization and it provides an in-depth assessment and insight into the candidate’s group-relationship skills. This meeting can involve multiple candidates; it is not uncommon to

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have about one-third of the group members being potential recruits, with the remainder consisting of ongoing members. Youth interpersonal skills in a group context are very important because they are so much a part of any group effort during training, as well as in the field, carrying out organizing projects. The third and final stage may take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, with the major emphasis usually on a group interview, although in some cases the process may be one-on-one. An individual interview is usually in order as a means of answering questions that were raised in the group interview, as well as giving the potential new member an opportunity to clarify points that he or she did not feel comfortable raising in the group context.

Preparation

It is artificial to view each of the stages described in this chapter as isolated from one another (Wilson et al. 2006). One stage influences the other, and this interactive effect continues throughout the organizing process (Carlson 2006; Wang 2006). LISTEN, Inc. (2003) highlights this important point when examining the role of communication skills in the recruitment process through outreach and recruitment. In their view, young people can develop their communication skills through one-to-one interactions, peer-to-peer outreach through social and family networks, schools, and other institu-tions, and the use of arts and cultural events, such as hip-hop shows and youth festivals, open community forums and events, and community tours and service-learning projects.

Content

A commitment to social and economic justice as a guiding philosophy and set of values helps young people develop a politicized sense of their world and the issues that impinge on their lives. Nevertheless, it is important for youth activists to understand how other groups beyond the young are oppressed in this society as well and are systematically deprived of their rights and opportunities to contribute to the general welfare of all.

Although the following comments by Wheeler (2003, 496) relate to youth development, they also are relevant to youth-led community organizing:

Presenting these young people with opportunities to express how society has thwarted their development often helps them to move forward in positive ways. Dealing with these difficult topics of gender, class, sexu-ality, and race has major implications for the content of youth devel-opment programs, the method of program delivery, staff training and

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development, and the creation of a safe environment that encourages all youth to act on and explore their own truths.

This journey of self-discovery has been labeled in a variety of ways, with identity support having the greatest currency in the organizing field.

The mere mention of social and economic justice among young people elicits responses addressing adultism, sexism, racism, and classism. How-ever, other issues such as homophobia, ableism, body image, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and intolerance of other religious groups may not be raised as frequently or with such intense emotional reactions. Some would argue that until youth are able to confront all forms of oppression, the youth-led movement cannot progress and become a force for progressive change in this society.

Undoubtedly, knowledge of other forms of oppression surely will emerge, offering a sad commentary on the lives of youth who are marginalized along ethnic and racial lines—that is, those with minimal knowledge of their own cultural history may need to be educated in that history before they are in a position to appreciate the cultures of others. This content can be deliv-ered in highly creative ways, including music, art, storytelling, and oral history projects. Various methods also facilitate the integration of this ma-terial throughout the experiences with youth-led organizing.

Youth organizers being prepared to engage in collective action must be exposed to an entire range of social and economic issues. This obligation places a tremendous onus on the facilitator and group. Journeys of expe-rience such as these invariably bring tensions and pain to group members because any process of discovery often leads to an in-depth exploration of subjugation, from the perspectives of both the oppressor and the oppressed. For example, the latter exposes prejudices that we may or may not be cognizant of (Martinez 1996).

Content related to sexually marginalized youth also must be included in any training program. An inclusive and affirming climate in youth-led or-ganizing, by definition, cannot be limited to socioeconomic class, race or ethnicity, and gender, although these are critical factors in the lives of urban youth of color. It also is extremely important that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth find a home in these social-change efforts. Youth Solidarity Summer (YSS) is a fine example of this situation:

I think in YSS we definitely prioritize the space as safe as possible for queer people. I think that we’re lucky to be able to do that, since it’s a space that we define and it’s not in a community. It’s easier to kind of set these ground rules and have this kind of discussion. Also there are a lot of queer people in our organizing collective, and I think that it’s good in the sense that it’s changed the way in which we’ve dealt with sexuality and the idea of queerness. . . . There are a lot of people without any support network and one thing that YSS at least tries to do is connect them with South Asian queer movements. (Malick and Ahmad 2001, 7)

RECRUITMENT, SCREENING, PREPARATION, AND SUPPORT

Failure to conceptualize oppression as including these young people means that an important opportunity has been missed to give voice to marginalized youth, and the result is that these groups have to create their own campaigns rather than join existing ones. When a separate youth net-work is necessary, this signals the broader community that the minority group’s voice is not important in the creation of a just and equitable society. Consequently, training must include content related to sexual marginali-zation and must raise the consciousness of youth about how oppression divides groups with common concerns.

Needless to say, such content never should be relegated to a unit of training that, once addressed, is not revisited. Instead, it warrants a promi-nent place, as well as an ongoing and highly integrative presence throughout the organizing experience. The problem of sexual marginalization is so im-portant that it necessitates its own unit in addition to its infusion throughout the preparation process. However, this does not mean that youth organizers must undertake a broad-based campaign to address every form of op-pression; young people can still focus on one or a couple of these forms of injustice. This selection of a focus, nevertheless, should be made within an analytical framework that examines the interaction of multiple forms of oppression. Awareness of the complexity and dynamics of these interrela-tionships is an important lesson for youth and adult organizers alike.

Social-change organizing efforts can assume a wide variety of appro-aches, such as direct action and civil disobedience, issuing of publications and media production, lobbying, boycotts, and research (Weiss 2003). A broad and multifaceted orientation for community organizing necessitates that different strategies be discussed in training sessions and that the roles for youth participants be clearly identified. The following are typical sub-jects to be covered in a training program. Their applicability undoubtedly will vary across regions and because of local circumstances, and this listing of topics is in no particular order of importance:

Working with the media

Building relationships

Identifying and researching com-

munity issues Building recruitment

Using communication technology Working across cultures Working with adult allies Developing public speaking and

other communication skills Producing newsletters and

videos

Performing in street theater pro-ductions

Solving problems

Resolving conflicts

Analyzing political situations

Conducting a force field analysis

Developing strategies and action

plans

Conducting direct-action tactics

Developing negotiating skills

Expanding group skills

Evaluating leadership

Chairing and facilitating meetings

Handling success and failure

Knowing when to seek help and

guidance

	CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION

Identifying personal and com-		Working with local community-
	munity assets	based organizations
Developing personal goals and		Maintaining a balanced life
	portfolios

The list of content areas is a sampling of what typically may be covered when training youth organizers. However, not all young participants are expected to undergo training in each of these topics. Readers well may argue that this material is not restricted to youth and also applies to adults; nevertheless, these topics have particular meaning for youth because of the limited opportunities young people have to obtain such knowledge and skills in an affirming and empowering atmosphere.

Also note that training does not have to be ‘‘front-loaded’’—that is, be-fore a campaign starts. There is no denying that training offered during the initial stages provides an opportunity for project leadership to assess new activists. There also is the possibility that young people who do not share the group’s expectations may be asked to leave during this phase. Never-theless, youth training is best thought of as an ongoing activity, shaped by the ongoing experiences of the young participants. While a training agenda is necessary, it must be sufficiently flexible to take into account local events and unexpected circumstances.

Methods

The need for youth-friendly methods to engage and prepare young par-ticipants is well recognized in the field (Otis 2006). Although there certainly is no consensus on which tools and techniques are the most effective, there is general agreement on what they should not be. Every effort must be made to provide a training experience that is qualitatively different from what most young people encounter in school, where adults are in charge and adults determine what is essential. Furthermore, in school, high-stake tests that have little meaning to marginalized youth increasingly dictate the material that is considered essential.

Conventional methods for imparting knowledge usually demand that young people be passive recipients rather than active participants, although there certainly are exceptions to this practice (Eyler and Giles 1999). Gin-wright (2003) addresses the potential benefits of education using a ser-vice learning approach, but also issues cautions that have implications for the training of youth organizers. However, this form of learning rarely integrates themes of social and economic justice or offers analysis of social problems in a community context. Further, outside of school, service learn-ing in marginalized communities limits who can participate because of fa-milial or work responsibilities (Murphy 1995).

It is strongly suggested that the training format be varied to help ensure youth engagement. Diversification of format and scheduling increases the

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receptivity of young people to learn the content (this is true when training adults, as well). Role plays, discussions, question-and-answer periods, vid-eos, and field trips are some of the most common methods, although di-dactic sessions also may be employed when deemed necessary and the participants are receptive to this approach. One method found to be par-ticularly attractive to young learners is hands-on immersion in and expo-sure to history through the use of visualization and role-play workshops; these exercises enable participants to have a visceral appreciation of social and economic issues (Wheeler 2003). In fact, Wheeler concluded that, though workshops require a high degree of emotional and physical safety within the group, they facilitate awareness of issues than more typically didactic approaches do not.

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