Youth Voice Enlivens CCFY Conference

	In this issue, we hear from young people who participated in CCFY’s 2002 conference, Going the Distance: Community Foundations and Youth. Atlanta-based writer Miriam Bagully, an alumna of Youth Communication, Metro Atlanta’s youth media organization, asked youth participants about the work they do with community foundations and in the community, the paths that lead to this work, and what motivates them to persevere.

Beginning with a welcome from high school sophomores Monica Foster and Marcella Padilla of Youth Engaged in Leadership and Learning in California, young people carried the message that today’s youth should have a safe environment in which to grow up, and they should have a say in the organizations that try to create that environment.

“One of the most important things for adults to realize, as we gather data and report stats on young people, is that youth themselves live the statistics,” according to Franklin Hysten, current Program Fellow and former Youth and Community Relations Coordinator for the East Bay Community Foundation. “If we want to have the best knowledge about what young people are experiencing in our communities,” Hysten explained, “we have to not only ask them, but involve them in planning and implementation of projects and initiatives that will affect their lives. They provide heart and urgency because they live out what the reports tell us.”

Many at the conference stated that they became involved to make friends, while others knew about problems and wanted to help. Joanna Ragan, a high school junior from Rockford, IL, and member of In Youth We Trust, the youth grantmaking program of the Community Foundation of Northern Illinois, explained, “Too many kids are being pulled into a life of gangs, drugs, and violence and it has to stop.” Senior Taylor Gilliland, an active member of STAR, which places young people on Sarasota (FL) government commissions and nonprofit boards, said that he wanted to become more involved with his county’s government because he objected to adults making decisions that affect youth both directly and indirectly, without ever consulting young people. He now serves as a voting member of the Sarasota County Stormwater Environmental Utility Board.

Hysten, now 25, became active in his Oakland community at the age of 16. He soon realized, “as my two younger sisters came into adolescence, I decided they should grow up in a safer and healthier environment than I did.”

Ragan summarized the opinion of many youth at the conference, “Going to the CCFY conference has made me realize more of the problems and challenges facing our community, but it has also made me see that there are solutions and people willing to help. It may not be easy, but improving our communities is possible; we just all have to do our part.”