In This Issue...

Coordinating Team Brings Record of Youth Engagement to Session II

KLCC Web Site Redesigned with Young People in Mind

The Persuasive Power of Firsthand Experience

The View from Here
Successful Youth/Adult Partnerships Begin with Respectful Listening

News and Notes
News from around the fellowship

Keeping it Real

KLCC is a program of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. For more information contact Dr. Valorie Johnson, program director, Youth and Education, or Dr. Frank Taylor, program director, Food Systems and Rural Development at:

W.K. Kellogg Foundation
One Michigan Avenue East
Battle Creek, MI 49017-4058

Or visit us online at www.KLCCleadership.org

By Anneliese M. Bruner

KLCC’s second session is off to a robust start, with the initial request for proposals attracting 26 applications from sites in 17 different states and the District of Columbia. Embracing the theme Youth-Adult Partnerships for the Advancement of Just Communities, Session II aims to engage youth and adults around issues of leadership on a scale never before attempted by the Foundation.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation program directors Frank Taylor and Chris Kwak view youth participation as critical to imparting relevancy and legitimacy to defining what “just” communities look like and how they will be achieved. Young people, therefore, are expected to comprise up to two-thirds of the Session II fellowship class. The final group of five Session II grantee sites was decided upon on March 17.

The consultant team working with the Foundation to coordinate Session II includes the Seattle-based Center for Ethical Leadership, which served as part of the coordinating organization (CO) team in KLCC Session I, and the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, based in Washington, DC.

The Innovation Center (IC) has been working in the arena of leadership development for approximately five years. “What we bring to the team is a strong background in youth adult partnership and youth engagement,” says Wendy Wheeler, IC president. “We bring training opportunities and tools to help them work in partnership. We’ll also bring knowledge about how youth engagement can take place, [and offer] different models around issues of social change.”

While the tools that Wheeler speaks of range from practical guides on mapping out community resources to the specifics of action planning and team building, other elements of IC’s approach make their contribution unique. They are at the forefront of coining a vocabulary that precisely describes the typical relationship between youth and adults at the societal level.

Lynn Luckow, a citizen activist who previously worked with Wheeler at the National 4-H Council in their former roles there, underwent a transformation under Wheeler’s tutelage in how he viewed youth and learned the new vocabulary. “It really [helped] me understand that youth have a voice. [They are a] highly undervalued resource in this culture of adultism. Wendy and the group gave me a vocabulary and framed the context of what happens with youth. [Essentially,] we put them aside until 18 and [then] expect something magical to happen,” Luckow says.

There are certain expectations about the roles people will assume when they come together to tackle a project. IC has found that these expectations can be a barrier to progress, a barrier that must be broken down even before the project can be undertaken.

“Authentic partnerships require adults to give up leadership and control that adults view as their right,” Wheeler says. On the flip side, she says, for young people “being friends with somebody your parents’ age is a slow process that requires trust building and understanding. But once the relationship is built, the partners are a touchstone for each other, the collaboration [provides a] new vision for addressing community problems.”

The other Session II coordinating organization partner, the Center for Ethical Leadership (CEL), has a long history of working across sectors in its quest to help create a more just society. Having been in existence for about 14 years, CEL is older and has a broader mission than IC, but much of its earliest work targeted youth as an important component of community development.

“One of the first programs we stepped into was working with youth,” says Karma Ruder, director of community collaboration at CEL. “[We worked with them] in summer institutes when [they] were in between school sessions. Some of that work got translated into a program that is called Youth Leaders of Promise, a curriculum that works in [Seattle area] schools to teach youth about servant leadership, democracy and civic engagement.

“We have a long tradition at the Center of believing that working with youth is important in terms of how we create the kind of society that we all want to live in,” Ruder says.

The coordinating team’s work will have an intrinsic teaching component that will go beyond the content of the direct training they will provide to the fellowship communities. Using what Wheeler calls double loop learning, the coordinating organization will not only determine how best to support fellowship communities through teaching, training and evaluation, it also will have high expectations for the way its members interact among themselves and with trainees.

“We’ll be doing the same thing we expect the communities to do; develop a skills assessment plan and hold each other accountable,” Wheeler says. “After each session, we’ll take our shoes off and think about what [we] just saw. How did youth and adults interact as they were training [others]? What was experienced and what was modeled? While learning content, we reflect on the experience. People love it because it helps cement learning, makes things more concrete for people right on the spot,” she says.

Ruder agrees that much of the success of Session II will rest on how well the CO team’s own process models cooperation. She envisions the creation of a “knowledge well” to facilitate the gathering and sharing of new knowledge.

Session II will also include a component not required in Session I. All of the Session II sites will be encouraged to include a development component in their work. Ruder says this “value-added” component is as significant as the process of bringing disparate members of the community together because it will consciously seek to create pathways for the sustainability of the work over the long haul. Involving youth in this aspect of the work is expected to yield interesting results.

“I am excited about the whole reality that young people come fresh to issues and materials, they bring a perspective that isn’t shaped by being inside institutions for lots of years,” Ruder says. “We help to create the conditions so that they have the support and tools and resources they need to make what needs to happen in their communities happen.”

Additional information can be found on the KLCC Web site: www.klccleadership.org.

KLCC Web Site Redesigned with Young People in Mind

By Anneliese M. Bruner

From its inception, one of KLCC’s goals has been to adapt continually to the program’s changing realities and needs. After agreeing on the necessity of an online presence, the KLCC communications team, which comprises representatives from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Langhum Mitchell Communications, and Online Architecture, launched the original Web site in the fall of 2003. With the recent launch of KLCC Session II, the site is now undergoing a redesign to give it a more dynamic feel and to broaden its appeal to youth.

When the inaugural Web site was launched in 2003, hopes were high that it would be a bridge between the various Session I stakeholders, in the important work of developing leadership in six local communities across the country, as well as become a resource for information about trends of practice in the leadership field.

“I think we did a good job of providing basic information about the program, and capturing the spirit of each [program] site’s intentions and achievements,” says Cheryl Fields, vice president of Langhum Mitchell, and a member of the communications team. “But we did not adequately exploit the potential of the medium, especially when it comes to sharing trends in the field and allowing site visitors to engage in dialogue with each other.”

During the inaugural session the primary focus was on disseminating information among peer sites about the work that was being done, and to other foundations, leadership development practitioners and to the general public about the existence and mission of the program itself. This focus on dissemination forced other Web priorities to take a back seat. The communications team views the debut of the second session, with its emphasis on youth-adult partnerships, as an opportunity to refine and revisit unplumbed priorities.

According to Valerie Baten, president of Online Architecture, the firm charged with the technical aspects of the Web work, a redesign is common after a site has been up for a while. “[You see] things you would like to do differently, what works, what doesn’t work, things you didn’t think about; that’s a typical process,” Baten says.

Perhaps the most obvious change to the KLCC site will be the introduction of Flash animation. Flash technology is de rigueur for any site that will be heavily trafficked by young people, Baten says. “We researched other sites that we know young people are going to [and] talk to other young people to see what they like. … [It’s an] ongoing effort, … there’s a whole science related to that.”

In addition to consulting outside sources, the communications team sought input from some of the younger members of their staffs and younger fellows from KLCC’s first session. This feedback affirmed the consulting team’s belief that young people generally constitute a more Internet-savvy audience and, therefore, would require a more sophisticated site to garner their attention and generate enthusiasm.

“Young people are not long on patience, they want to get what [they] want quickly,” Fields says. “[The previous] static homepage seemed inappropriate for this new session. Our primary objective with the redesign is for users to get to the site and see something that appeals to them immediately,” Fields says.

Beyond the cosmetic, the KLCC Web site changes also aim to increase utility. One example of how Baten’s team is working to achieve this goal is by making the site more interactive. For example, a national map, which on the original site was static and showed the various states where KLCC has program sites, has been replaced with a more interactive version. In its new incarnation, the map enables viewers to not only see where the sites are located, but, by clicking on any of the locations, they can link directly to a page featuring more details about the work being done at that site.

Since more than one KLCC session will be active at a time, the Web site must also be able to serve an increasingly diverse audience of users simultaneously. While the overall feel of the Web site will reflect the emphasis of the newest active session — in this case youth and adults who work with youth — it must do so without alienating or marginalizing users who are mainly interested in the work of earlier sessions.

The communications team admits that balancing the interests of the various anticipated users is no easy feat. In the process of deciding what to include in the redesign, discussions arose over the appropriateness of including features such as unmoderated chat rooms, a feature requested by the coordinating organization and often found on sites frequented by young people. Concerns around the potential for abuse of this feature were weighed against a need for openness and relevancy, which led to a compromise; incorporating a bulletin board format for people to exchange ideas and information directly. Another idea that may be developed going forward is transactional commerce.

“We realize it is impossible for us to incorporate every idea, or even to anticipate every need,” Fields says. “Nonetheless, we’re trying to build in enough flexibility to allow us to add features as we go along.”

The KLCC communications team and the Session II coordinating organization have discussed the possibility of forming an advisory group that would include youth and adult representatives from each Session II program site to help further refine the session’s communications tools, including the Web site. Content development for Session II sections of the KLCC Web site might ultimately become the advisory group’s responsibility, a move that would deliver on the promise of youth-adult partnerships to shape the functionality of the program on every front.

Baten hopes expanding the site’s functionality will create opportunities for site traffic to increase over time. The technical part of the redesign is mostly complete. To publicize the upgrade, there will be a direct mailing to fellows, some online marketing, and indexing with popular search engines. Additional marketing will be considered later this year, once the new fellows are onboard.

For Fields, enabling KLCC participants and other site users to contribute to the site’s content is as important as improvements to the ease of use and the visual environment of the site.

“The communications team looks forward to creating more opportunities for interaction among site users and to working with more young people to develop the Web presence further,” she adds. “We agree that there can be no just community without the participation of the whole population. Young people have to be included, even in our communications efforts.”

The Persuasive Power of Firsthand Experience

Leaders at the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development say the first step toward persuading a community to invest more in youth-adult partnerships is helping local change agents identify an opportunity to experience the benefits of these partnerships, firsthand. Citing an example in Wisconsin, Wendy Wheeler, president of the Innovation Center, illustrates just how transformational the energy that proceeds from successful youth-adult partnerships can be to a community.

The city manager of Waupaca, Wisc., wanted to construct a youth pool in a local park. As part of the planning process, three differently configured teams were asked to put forth their best ideas. One team consisted entirely of adults; a second committee consisted of youth from the community that would be served by the pool; the third and most successful team was made up of a cadre of youth and adults. The third team’s ideas were the most sound and creative and led to the plans that are currently being implemented. Almost predictably, the adult group produced a feasible yet uninspired proposal while the youth group had fantastical ideas that would have been impossible to translate into the practical.

It is outcomes such as the one in Waupaca that Wheeler says Kellogg Leadership for Community Change hopes to see emerge from the five Session II communities.

Photo by Cheryl D. Fields

“Our society, for the most part, considers young people to be less important and inferior to adults. It does not take young people seriously and does not include them as decision makers in the broader life of their communities.”

- John Bell, long-time youth worker and author of "Understanding Adultism:
A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships,"
which can be found online at http://www.freechild.org/bell.htm