for more information… Hawaii Community Foundation Steven Kaneshiro PROGRAM OFFICER FOR HUMAN SERVICES 900 Fort Street Mall Pioneer Plaza, Suite 1300 Honolulu, HI 96813 808-537-6333 www.hcf-hawaii.org
	Photo courtesy of the Hawaii Community Foundation
	To date, 85 YouthMappers in Hawaii have fanned out across four islands, meeting with residents and business owners as they develop an inventory of resources available to Hawaii’s youth.

Young people in Hawaii are discovering that it’s not at all hard to get answers to their questions… all they have to do is ask the right people.

That’s the motivation behind Hawaii YouthMapping, a youth development project coordinated by the Hawaii Community Foundation and Aloha United Way. About 85 YouthMappers, typically teens, canvass neighborhoods block by block to gather data about positive people, places, and possibilities—resources that are available to them and their families. Once the information has been collected, the young participants create a resource map and make the information available to others through various media.

HELPING YOUNG PEOPLE BECOME COMMUNITY BUILDERS
The Hawaii Community Foundation’s interest in YouthMapping was sparked by an RFP from the Center for Youth Development & Policy Research. Youth development had become a focus for them in the mid-1990s with Ke Ala Hoku (“Star Course”), a youth visioning and benchmarking project involving 6,000 youth across the islands. “These young people worked together to create a vision for the future of our state,” says Janis Reischmann, Hawaii Community Foundation vice president. The community foundation was so excited by the young participant’s enthusiasm and energy, they put together Na Opio O Ke Ala Hoku (“Young People of the Star Course”), a board of young people charged with allocating grant funds from the community foundation to promote youth volunteerism projects.

TAKING THE NEXT STEP WITH YOUTHMAPPING
“YouthMapping gave us the opportunity to continue building a framework for youth development,” Janis says. Perhaps more importantly, YouthMapping has helped the community foundation focus on nurturing and opportunity building rather than fixing kid’s problems.

To make sure the program stayed on course, the community foundation hired a staff person to coordinate the efforts of participating community agencies, pull in participants, train Navigators (a core group of 30 youth from across the state who now plan, coordinate, and direct the project), and work with a multi-sector oversight committee. Initial training and technical assistance came from the Center for Youth Development & Policy Research. To date, Hawaii’s YouthMappers have visited six communities on four islands, clearly a challenge in terms of coordination and administration. Local sponsors—a high school, social services agency, family center, and children’s center—host mapping teams and help with technical assistance. But it’s the kids themselves who develop plans, knock on doors, talk with their neighbors, and organize the information they gather. The results of their work can be found on the group’s self-designed and maintained web site at www.youthmappinghawaii.org.

CHANGING COMMUNITY ATTITUDES
“It’s been exciting to see how the community’s view of young people has changed since the project began,” says Janis Reischmann. There are adults who view the teens with suspicion; some noticeably so. “The kids were hurt by some of the attitudes they saw…they didn’t understand it.” But as adults and teens have talked together about ways to help Hawaii’s young people, adult’s attitudes have changed for the better. These days, YouthMappers are asked to participate in focus groups as community representatives. Some members of the community, including local police, seek their direct input.

The community foundation is about to turn the YouthMapping project over to the statewide YMCA, an organization that wants to engage older kids. A recent three-year funding commitment from the community foundation, and a goal of engaging 350 young people and 30 communities across the state, indicates that YouthMapping—and community building between young people and adults—is on solid ground in Hawaii.

LESSONS LEARNED
The community foundation has learned that a project like YouthMapping has special staffing needs. “It’s vital to find a leader who identifies with, motivates, and works well with kids, but who also provides structure,” Janis Reischmann says.

Data dissemination is also important. “Awareness about how we make information available has been heightened,” she adds. “YouthMapping provides us with a rich source of information… we continue to look for ways to analyze and disseminate what we learn so that it has meaning for many audiences.”