Posts Tagged ‘Youth’
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Resource Document: Innovations in International Volunteering
I was interested to find out about Innovations for Civic Participation, an organisation that promotes the creation of opportunities for young people to engage with their communities. Based in the US, it encourages the creation of a network of organisations that are active and committed to the case of youth participation in civic activities. The ICP is involved in a range of programmes, details of which may be an interesting read for people involved in youth volunteering.
In 2008, V commissioned the ICP to conduct a study of 22 innovative youth volunteering programmes from around the world – the resulting document is a good read for anyone working in the sector.
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Obama on youth volunteering
This article from Newsday is a good follow-up to my previous posts on the state of volunteering in the US, and to a smaller extent, even my post on the Generational Theory. President Obama signed the Serve America Act a couple of weeks ago and requested the youth of America to take part in volunteering huge numbers. He states the completely different circumstances of today’s younger generation, that grew up in ‘the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic recession without precedent’. The article questions whether Obama’s initiatives to increase volunteering among young people in America would be any more successful than those implemented by Presidents Bush or even Clinton, but then mentions how Obama himself has done a lot of volunteering in his lifetime and doesn’t utter empty words not backed by experience. The article also cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a book that documented the decrease in civic engagement from the 1960′s onwards, something that I personally think about a lot. (Putnam speaks of the concept of social capital and how that contributes to re-vitalising or improving the condition of a society).
Indirectly touching on the Generational Theory, the article also mentions how people born during the difficulties that came about as a result of the Depression and the Second World War were more service-oriented than the baby boomers that followed, and therefore the young people of today who are struggling with the effects of terrorism, war, natural disasters and economic meltdown are, in a repetition of the characteristics of people born two generations before them, more open to volunteering.
I thought this was one of the more interesting paragraphs of the article:
The generation entering adulthood is also the first one intimately acquainted with the most advanced communication technologies the world has ever known – such as cell phones, text messaging and the Internet. And we know that having a social connection to someone who is civically engaged is an important predictor of whether someone volunteers.
There aren’t enough youth volunteering organisations that reach out to young people on their terms. v is doing a lot to change this with vInspired.
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Art Locates Me
A Northwest England-based non-profit digital arts organisation called Folly has started a programme called Art Locates Me, a project to produce and distribute work made by young people in Cumbria, UK, as part of their ArtCast series. It aims to increase the opportunities for young people to participate in digital arts and contribute to their personal and social development along the way, as well as to aid the development of Cumbria as a whole. The project will pair collaborating artists with young people to impart skills ranging from filmmaking and photography to music production and graphic design.
I think this is an important kind of project, because it teaches young people exactly the kind of skills they want to learn in this digital age. In fact, these are some of the skills that could well change the image of volunteering from being boring to cool and ‘with it’.
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