Youth Action Force

I have always been someone who likes involvement.  In fact, it was involvement that led me to work with kids.  When I was in high school, there was a group called Torn Curtain that wanted to get a youth center developed in the town I grew up in of Rockford, Minnesota.  Torn Curtain did have a religious connection to the Christian faith and they reached out to a community member who had children in the district.  The individual that they reached out to was a lady named Lynn and she had a connection to the Rockford Community Education department of the schools.  That is why they approached her to get the ball rolling on this topic.  Anyways, a group of my friends at the time asked me to be involved in this venture.  I was a senior in the high school and decided to meet with this group on occasion to get the idea moving even further.  Now, as a high school senior, Torn Curtain's desire to have this happen was for their religion.  I am not sure if their motivation was financially driven, but they wanted this to happen.  After meeting with them a handful of times, we as a group looked at how difficult it was to get the idea of a youth center to accepted in the communities of Rockford and Greenfield.  Rockford, Minnesota is located about 35 or so miles outside of Minneapolis in western Hennepin County.  We were pretty rural for only being that far away from Minneapolis and it was a classic case of small town difficulty in getting something different to be accepted.  Anyways, after a few failed attempts to get community leadership to like the idea of getting a youth center built, we decided to step back and look at the steps we were taking in making this a reality.  One of the other group members and myself pitched the idea of stepping back from the youth center concept and launching a group that got students more involved in the community.  In our small community of Rockford, you either participated in sports or music and that was about it.  If you were not involved in those things, it led to more free time which led to the opportunity of more risky behaviors including things like binge drinking, drugs, or sexual experimentation.  So, I co-founded our group and we called it "Youth Action Force".  It became the backbone of Youth Development in Rockford.  We created a video to pitch the group, we had a booth up at the local Rockford Riverdays Festival and we had logos and banners and we were going strong.  Another reason we decided to go away from the youth center concept and detach from the involvement of Torn Curtain was we didn't want their to be a religious affiliation tied to the group.  We felt this would discourage someone outside of the Christian faith to not participate because of that affiliation and that was kind of going against what we were trying to do.  We also couldn't have a religious connection if we were going to bring this into the schools.  It would've completely limited what we could have done to gain exposure.  So, the meeting with Torn Curtain was an uncomfortable one.  It was intense and I personally did not see their reaction coming prior to the meeting we had with them. We simply wanted to get youth involved in the community before trying to get to a youth center built. The members of Torn Curtain were mad and they were not shy about voicing their anger.  For me personally, this reassured to me that we had made the right decision.  This also told me that they had their own hidden agenda with this mission and it didn't match up with ours.  We also wanted to reach out and offer youth involvement to the community to those students who didn't feel like they had a place or an identity.  I am talking about those students who didn't play sports, who did participate in band or choir, and didn't have the home support to guide them in what positive involvement was.  I also didn't know how much work leading this organization would be.  We were doing things in the community like taking care of a memorial garden around a flagpole in tribute of a respected community member, we also did fundraisers to raise money for things that involved youth in a positive way that there were no funds for, and we even had a Youth Speak Out Day at school.

After launching the program and introducing it to students, we had like 70 youth signed up with Youth Action Force and they had active roles within the group.  I still to this day do not know how we pulled of the Youth Speak Out at school because the principal allowed us to have an entire afternoon, have break out sessions in all the classes, and alter the daily schedule to make the program work.  I don't know how we did it.  We took all 70 signed up youth plus the original six of us who were the board of directors and we paired up and held discussions in classrooms about community involvement, the state of the youth, and what the responsibility of youths were in the community.  It was a huge success, but the burnout was starting to hit.

With everything going on with Youth Action Force, I had to still carry a regular job.  I started off at college for awhile, but college was not the most important thing on the radar for me.  They were not really supportive of it, morally or financially.  So I was kind of lost myself.  You see, the Youth Action Force organization was welcomed with both arms from the community.  The city loved the proactive approach, the county collaborative was impressed, and the Community Education department of the Rockford School District loved that it was happening because it was the cornerstone of their youth development that they were required to address.  However, there never was any money to pay for everything that I was doing.  I did this all for free and eventually I came to an ultimatum with myself.  I either needed the Rockford School District to pay me as an employee for what I was doing, or I was going to have to leave it so I can focus on taking care of myself.  In the end, after three years of dedicating everything to Youth Action Force, I had to step away. Unfortunately, the program ended up going away shortly after my involvement had ended.  It could have been a great long lasting program.  I had a couple of other schools districts that were interested in developing their own Youth Action Force chapters, I suppose I would call it.  Youth Action Force was becoming a brand, but without the initial financial commitment it was suffocating.

I am proud of what I accomplished with Youth Action Force because I can call it my own.  I was not the only one involved but I co-created it and co-coordinated it and I am proud of that.  Even though I didn't make a dime from any of it, it did give me a whole set of skills for the future that I use today. It eventually did lead me to another Community Education opportunity with the Crosby-Ironton School District, which I miss and will talk about in a future blog post.  Youth Action Force taught me to think out of the box, make decisions on the fly, and multitask.  I need all of these things in my job today working with a high concentration of special education and mental health students.  I still have my Youth Action Force banner at my house today and I will have it forever.

#yaf