Youth speak up about civic involvement

Last Tuesday night at the UBS Forum here at Minnesota Public Radio, about 40 teenagers gathered to talk about community and civic involvement. Civic involvement is the act of being involved in a community's policies and laws.

It's active participation as a citizen.

Minnesota Public Radio news analysts and researchers from The Humphrey Institute wanted to hear if teenagers want to be involved in their community and in their local governments.

The teenagers were from several high schools and community groups in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

We broke into small groups for an hour to discuss four approaches to civic involvement.

One approach was mandatory service. A teenager, perhaps upon graduation from high school, would be required to give a period of time (maybe a year?) to community service--a program like Americorps.

In the group that I was moderating, several kids said they were averse to anything that had "mandatory" in the title. But one young woman pointed out that if she didn't HAVE to do something, she probably wouldn't, even if she thought it was a good idea.

Another approach to civic involvement that we discussed was service learning. Service learning combines community service with classroom instruction. Students could serve as election judges in training, for example, and then reflect on those experiences as part of a broader curriculum. This approach is popular in some high schools. Students in my group said that service learning was the "fun part" of being in school and that they often got to go to new parts of the city or to an organization they had never heard of.

The small groups adjourned and we all met in the UBS Forum for the last hour of discussion. One teenager said he wanted to see elected officials make an effort to come to his neighborhood. He said "our governor and mayor have never come to our school or done anything to get to know us."

Zoe Haas is the program director of Youth Farm and Market Project in Minneapolis.

Her advice is to get involved right in your neighborhood.

"Start local. Meet your neighbors. Go to centers, and find out what's going on in your neighborhood. If they tell you they don't have a program for people your age, start something."

I love that one of the teens admitted she didn't like to do anything she "had" to do, and yet unless she "had" to, she wouldn't probably do something even if she thought it was a good idea.

Is this the result of an overscheduled childhood? One that leaves young people unable/unwilling to take initiative or pursue a passion unless they are forced to do so? Maybe I'm just getting old...