Many youth and adults across the country are gathering informational resources for young people.
COLLIN SEARS: Hi. My name is Collin Sears and I'm a youth mapper for Baltimore City. I'm here today to navigate you through a brief description of a project. It's called Community Youth Mapping. Are you on the map?
Community Youth Mapping provides opportunities for young people to prove what we've known all along, that young people are very concerned about and committed to both the healthy development of themselves and the communities in which they live. Let's take a look.
PARTICIPANT: Hey, the next time you say something bad about our young people, think about the 50 youngsters who are conducting a special survey. They want to know what's out there for them.
JILL MASON: They need a place to connect, a place to be with each other where they are not learning anything, they are not supposed to be doing anything. It's just a place to go and relax.
LaJUAN GRAHAM: Well, I went to the carwash and I asked them did they deal with youth, children, or adults. They said they deal with youth because they say they give any poor person or homeless person a try.
PETER CAMERON: There might be some programs there or services that they are like having problems at home or anything like help with homework. They can just always go there and get help and feel better about themselves.
KEWANA AKHALU: Like more youth centers like for teen pregnancy if they need to go somewhere and talk or places for recreation for youth.
DAN CONDON: What we're trying to do is find youth resources from a youth perspective. It's happening in 22 other cities nationwide.
COLLIN SEARS: When we map our communities, we are basically looking for places to go, opportunities, and things to do. Community Youth Mapping has served many communities in different ways. It's a way to mobilize youth and adults in the community. It's a way for communities to identify under-served neighborhoods and advocate for additional resources.
It's a way for the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to collaborate in a meaningful process. It's a way for young people to gain skills about interview protocol, data gathering, and data analysis and conflict resolution.
It's a way of gaining greater awareness of the resources that currently exist in our communities. Community Youth Mapping gets young people involved as major stakeholders in their community, but also requiring accountable support and collaboration of additional stakeholders.
Young people, called mappers, go through a two-day training to prepare for community youth mapping. While participating in training, young people develop a stronger bond with each other through the various exercises and lessons. This training covers issues such as world of work, conflict resolution, oral and written communication, and interpersonal relations.
Through the team building and life skills development gained in the training, young people are prepared for the challenges and triumphs they will face during the Community Youth Mapping process. Youth and adults in some communities have also been trained to become trainers of the process.
One of the most important pieces of the process is the feeling we get when we go somewhere we have identified as a resource for young people, children, or families. It is very useful for us to record our impressions on the survey.
Once young people are trained, they are ready to go out and map. Young people canvas their communities in search of places to go and things to do. However, we have had to use more than our feet to get around in some places. A mixture of urban, suburban, and rural cities have done Community Youth Mapping and transportation is always an issue.
Mappers have utilized public, donated, and personal modes of transport to get to places that were out of walking distance. At the end of each mapping day young people sit down with the field supervisor or project coordinator. We call this the debriefing. The primary purpose of a debriefing is to make sure that the surveys that are collected are accurate, legible, and complete.
Young people and adults also work on ways of analyzing and presenting the data that we collected. We look for general offerings and gaps and available resources.
The next step is getting this information out. People have been working to get this information out into the larger community through kiosk, webpages, and the Youth Line. The Youth Line is an information sharing phone line staffed by youth and adults. San Francisco, Boston, and New York currently have Youth Lines up.
Let's take a look at the original Youth Line in New York City.
TOM BROKAW: America Closeup now, keeping children out of harm's way. Tonight being a teenager can be a rough setting for young people. Often it can seem there's just nowhere for them to turn for help. Now a new group of young people who can really help are turning telephone lines into life lines. Here is NBC's Betty Rollins.
BETTY ROLLINS: This is Youth Line.
PARTICIPANT: Do you have the gun in your possession right now?
PARTICIPANT: How do you feel about your girlfriend being pregnant?
PARTICIPANT: Do you need a job?
BETTY ROLLINS: It's a 24-hour-a-day toll free telephone service in New York City staffed by young people for young people. Listeners like 17-year-old Jose Rivera provide information about everything from jobs to training programs. But mainly for the growing number of young people have no one to talk to, they provide an ear.
PARTICIPANT: It's okay for these kids how to tell someone you really like them. This way you feel more comfortable telling that person over the phone.
BETTY ROLLINS: Many of the 400 calls Youth Line receives each day are about relationships. If a listener senses danger or needs assistance, he raises a flag and a social worker is there.
PARTICIPANT: Tell us the reason that you feel like you need to kill yourself.
BETTY ROLLINS: By paraphrasing Jose lets the social worker in on the call.
PARTICIPANT: So they don't listen to you so you feel like you need that attention. I'm here to listen to you.
BETTY ROLLINS: How to listen is part of an intensive training course that all 92 high school and college students who work here must take. The course also teaches them not to be judgmental and never to give advice but rather to help callers help themselves.
PARTICIPANT: I could give you a place that might help you find a job.
BETTY ROLLINS: Sometimes the caller just wants to know where something is like an employment agency or a doctor.
PARTICIPANT: Okay. Right now I'm going to do a search in your area and hopefully we can find something for you.
BETTY ROLLINS: Youth Line's computer data base listing 10,000 resources was gathered block by block and compiled on a grid by the young people themselves.
PARTICIPANT: Okay. Just put the gun down. It's not in your hand at this moment?
BETTY ROLLINS: When the young listeners get this kind of a call, they know to stay calm.
KATHERINE GLORIOSO: Normally I go, "Oh, my God," and faint on the floor but the training says be calm, be calm. If you're not calm, if you get excited, then the caller might get excited.
PARTICIPANT: So you say this is something that you want to do, only to sit down and talk to her. When was the last time you all sat down and had a talk? But you are willing to try one more time?
BETTY ROLLINS: Youth Line, which began a year and a half ago in New York is now starting up in San Francisco and the federal government may take it nationwide. That's because youth line not only serves young people but trains and employs them as well in a job that is more than just a job.
PARTICIPANT: He was saying that he was just out of control but after talking or whatever he felt much better.
SOCIAL WORKER: Good job.
BETTY ROLLINS: For America Closeup, Betty Rollins, NBC News, Brooklyn, New York.
COLLIN SEARS: Community Youth Mapping has also had another positive impact. There are many adults in the communities that have no day-to-day contact with young people.
These people often form their perceptions of young people from what they see on television and read in the newspaper. Community Youth Mapping provides the media with opportunities to portray youth as important contributors to the well being of their community.
PARTICIPANT: The young mappers will give their surveys to area youth serving agencies and they will be wiser for it.
COLLIN SEARS: To summarize, Community Youth Mapping is a process in which young people canvas their own community in search of places to go and things to do. In this process young people partner with adults in a mutually empowering and respectful relationship.
This relationship provides young people with opportunity for skill development and meaningful involvement in a community building process. Community Youth Mapping is a great developmental project for young people that benefits the entire community. So, are you ready to get on the map?
