When organizing, a community needs to consider its most significant goals. These goals are generally fairly similar across the board: Safer neighborhoods, beautification, poverty reduction, to name a few. Many times 'Youth Programming,' or something similar, makes its way onto the list.
While, like many goals, 'Youth Programming' sounds promising - after all, what parent doesn't like the idea of their child spending time engaged in education or athletic activities? - it seems to me that it often strikes an unfair balance between being 'for' younger members of a community and being created 'with' the younger members of a community.
When I refer to children and youths as younger members of a community, I believe that they deserve this status. Young people, especially younger than voting age, can bring an enormous amount of information and wisdom to the table that their older counterparts may not be aware of, or may have simply missed. Putnam touches on this briefly in 'Better Together,' in his chapter on the 'Do Something' programs, but I feel that it deserves a deeper look.
Younger members of a community - especially in poverty-stricken neighborhoods - can, if listened to, provide an enormous, often overlooked, source of insight as to the ins and outs of a community. Sub-18 year-olds generally have more free time than adults and generally lack the singular motorized transit models of nine-to-five employees. Compare your awareness to the neighborhood you grew up in to your awareness of your current neighborhood. Where are the shortcuts? What parts of town should you avoid? Who has big dogs?
The methods of transit used by youngsters (bicycles, skateboards, on foot) provide all sorts of information. We should also consider the way that minors interact: if they are in school, they spend all day in a social beehive: the information flows which course through an inner-city high school must be incredible. The question is: how can community organizers tap into this information flow, and how can we use the information to benefit the community?
What I see as the most immediate answer to this question is simply: don't merely create programs FOR youth, create programs WITH youth. Any good organizer leaves his or her agenda at the door, allowing residents to identify their own issues and helps them find solutions. Why, then, do we still mandate programming upon youth, while they maintain a better idea as to what they, as a sub-community, actually need?
To involve younger members of a community in organizing efforts is key, and the first step in doing so is asking them what types of programs they want, what kinds of programs they see as being necessary.
