Youth

Let’s start with some yes or no questions.

• Does your community have any one under the age of 21 in it?
• Does your community devote any public resources to young people?  
• Does your community involve young people in making strategic decisions about your community’s resources?

If you answered “yes” or “no” to any of these questions, then you should keep reading.

Obligation or Boon? (answer: Both)

Engaging young people can be seen as both an obligation (they are stakeholders) and a boon. Young people can expand your talent pool; they can diversify and broaden participation; and they can identify new issues and new solutions that will offer a welcome departure from your town meeting regulars.

Beyond this, the effort to engage young people can force you to reconsider what you think you know about planning. In reaching out to young people, you will find that you are doing a better job of reaching out to everyone. Your message becomes more straightforward (not dumber), your answers less circumspect, and your communications more accessible.

Storytelling and art can be powerful tools to help identify and act on shared values in a community planning process. The Foundation has been working with five communities in the Rocky Mountains and New England over the last three years integrating story sharing or art making into their planning efforts with great results. The process has built new relationships and bridges between divided groups; brought new voices to the project; revealed common values and connections; and built empathy and hope.

In a nutshell, it transforms the planning process.

Photo: Biddeford students share stories they gathered for a class designed by Carolyn Gosselin.

I’m not sure at what age it happens, but at some point, you find yourself saying something about “Kids these days...” and it’s rarely the start of a compliment about the younger generation.

I routinely hear people complain about how teens are apathetic, consumer driven and that they would rather text with their friends than have a real conversation.

I’m writing today to share three stories from Maine that fly in the face of that common sentiment.

You’ve probably heard of Braddock, Pennsylvania given the attention it’s gotten for its rising-from-the-ashes, against-all-odds resurgence over the past decade or so.

Much of the credit for this renewal has gone to Braddock’s Mayor, John Fetterman, who has committed his own money to projects ranging from an at-risk youth program to a church-turned-community-center to a non-profit called Braddock Redux, which puts up money for community revitalization projects and advances what Fetterman calls his “social-justice agenda.”

Susan Halpern recently wrote a story for The New York Times about Fetterman called “Mayor of Rust”. She lauds Fetterman and his folk-hero status—“a Paul Bunyan hipster of urban revival.” And this seems appropriate given his demonstrated commitment to Braddock, where poverty is the norm and 27 consecutive months without a homicide is really astonishingly good news.

Stephanie Joyce in Juneau, Alaska. Photo: Kevin Elliott

I live life on a fairly short timescale. At 22, a year still seems like a long time, a decade almost interminable.

The idea of planning 30 or 50 years down the line borders on laughable. I don’t even know where I’ll be next year, after I graduate from Middlebury College. So I struggle with the idea of long-term community planning. In such a rapidly changing world, long-range vision strikes me as a tall order.

Remember when you were a kid walking along a narrow, weedy sidewalk next to a busy street or a wide asphalt swath of surface parking and you knew, just knew, that this was not a gentle condition—that, in fact, it was a very threatening condition?

As you got a little older, you started to accept this as the American way of life: that cars rule and little you, on your feet or on your bike, were fair game to the motorized world; that curbs were meant to be cut; that strips of stores were meant to be lined up behind acres of asphalt; that melting snow (no longer white) was supposed to be swooshed on your new yellow seersucker bell bottoms (because it’s 1974) that you had to beg your mother for.

Jared Duval’s book Next Generation Democracy has just been released by Bloomsbury. Jared is on my Board, so I’ll admit my bias. But there’s no doubt his book is an important contribution to the evolving discussions on where democracy needs to go in our communities and our country.

Part educational and part advocacy, Jared’s engaging book offers a refreshing perspective on how the philosophy and field of open source software has shaped the “millenial generation” and its expectations of governments (and institutions). Being of the millennial generation himself, Jared is able to draw from his own experience and that of his contemporaries, as well as “baby boomers’” work and perspectives on the pressing topic of how to improve a system of government that clearly isn’t working.

In a recent column, David Brooks made the case for studying the liberal arts at a time when accounting majors are having the best luck finding work. He talked about the ability of the arts and humanities to tap into emotions inaccessible through other means—a gateway to understanding that which cannot be quantified or deconstructed.

The places we live in can be measured, mapped and analyzed on multiple fronts. But they are also defined by the multiple stories within, by the nature of their landscape, by the motivations of leaders and laborers and by the feelings people carry with them. If we want to plan for and create sound futures for our cities and towns, we need to incorporate the arts and humanities into community building.