for Children and Youth - Ventura County Star

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28 Creating Asset Rich Environments for Children and Youth Ventura County Picture According to the 2005-2006 California Healthy Kids Survey, the percentage of students reporting having a high level of meaningful participation in school were: ◆◆ 16 % of 5th and 11th graders, ◆◆ 17 % of 7th graders and ◆◆ 13 % of 9th graders in Ventura County Over 80% of our young people believe they do not have a voice in making school rules, in determining the products that contribute to their grades, and in evaluating the effectiveness of school practices and policies. More young people report high levels of meaningful participation in the community than in schools. The “take home message,” is that too many young people in Ventura County who participated in this survey revealed that they are not engaged in meaningful participation in either school or the community.
Creating Asset Rich Environments for Children and Youth 29 What We Can Do! Meaningful participation is not a program – it is as simple as taking the time to listen to youth and engage them in planning and working to improve the organizations, communities, and activities to which they belong. Youth need to be involved not just for the experience, but more importantly to bring about results, and then to share in the credit and celebration for their accomplishments. Success Story: Creating Meaningful Participation Project Cornerstone is the Santa Clara County-wide collaborative working to mobilize the entire community to shift from reacting to children and youth as problems to connecting with them so they thrive. It aims to ensure that every aspect of a diverse community - individuals, businesses, community organizations, schools and government - understand and embrace the fact that interacting with young people is important...and that every interaction makes a difference. http://www.projectcornerstone.org/ index.htm Young people need a core group of adults who are willing to work with them as partners to try on new roles and ways of accomplishing the mission of the group. We can start by building youth and adult capacity. Providing youth with authentic opportunities to participate and make decisions on issues that affect them involves a learning and trust-building process that is likely to shape not only the youth, but the adult members as well. The work begins by engaging youth on one or two key issues that they are passionate about – something that is affecting their daily lives. The issue may be broken school bathrooms, food choices in the cafeteria, or the type of recreation facilities available in the community. But we won’t know what is important to them until we create an open dialogue with our children and youth to identify one change that could make school or community a better place for them. Once we learn about these issues from our youth, we can link the changes to broader systemic efforts to reform and improve youth services. Integrating service-learning programs with school and community is one way to create positive effects on students’ sense of social responsibility, as well as on their academic success. Service learning allows students to apply their academic skills and knowledge to address real-life needs in their own communities. It provides a compelling reason to learn, teaches the skills of civic participation, develops an ethic of service and civic responsibility and builds their self-efficacy. (Search Institute, 2003).
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for Children and Youth - Ventura County Star

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