Evolution of United Way Youth Venture

By Phil Grzewinski, president of United Way of North Central Massachusetts 

The question is quite simple.  When, in the lives of young people, does society truly ask for and value their opinions about taking action on a problem? Usually this occurs some time after they have left the school environment and have entered the world of work. Prior to this time, the adult community typically relates to young people in a manner that directs the majority of their activities. This occurs due to a practical need for adults to ensure that young people achieve certain levels of knowledge or social skills to aid their advancement in our educational systems.  After all, they are just young people.

However, - they do have very complex ideas and notions on our community and society, including how to make it better.  We do not, for the most part, engage them at this level. We tend to discredit their notions due to their age and our perceptions of their lack of experience. In doing so we overlook their true capacity to benefit our community and miss a critical opportunity to enhance their development, resulting in an incredible loss of potential for all.

Yet for the past 25 years, around the world, top changemakers who have and are seeking to improve societal conditions have turned to young people as part of the solution to create lasting social change.  They do not just process their young people in adult-led activity, but actively engage them to become part of the creative solutions to the issue/problem that they have committed their lives to making better.

Bill Drayton, chairman and founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, observed this phenomena around the globe with his organizations’ network of social entrepreneurs. He responded by creating the international organization Youth Venture. The benefits and impact of this program are many. It taps into the resources of the young to help them feel the power of being valued for their ideas, and at the same time make a positive contribution to the community.

The real power comes from the notion that the changes felt by them at this early point in their development will positively impact them later in life - when they will want to replicate this experience and continue to help society.  Mr. Drayton speaks to this matter as a fundamental right for young people equal to that of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movements in our society.

Youth Venture is a youth-led program that uses adults as guides only.  All action and decisions are placed within the hands of young people for them to create a community benefit from inception to implementation as well as succession for future young people to manage.  The best part is that Youth Venture is designed for all young people not just the natural born leaders or high achievers.

Early in my United Way career I had the opportunity to create and run a youth leadership program. It was modeled, as were many similar efforts throughout the country, on the concept of replicating the work of our Community Investment Panels, whereby we recruited a representative from each of our area high schools senior class and lead them through some group bonding activities. We provided the group with $10,000 and helped them through the process of deciding how to invest in the community.  They determined that addressing substance abuse in their own high schools would be the target issue and released an RFP to the students of the schools that they represented. To make a long story short the result of the effort was a marketing success with outstanding media coverage of their efforts and the interesting programs were funded. But ……., I never had a good feeling about what we were doing that was commensurate with the popular reaction to the program.

Bear with me and I’ll explain. First was the cost to make the program possible. It literally took one half of my time as a Director in Metro I community. Second, these young people were the cream of the crop and were going to be successful in whatever they decided to do in life. It wasn’t addressing a need in their life; it merely gave them extra practice doing what they had already become proficient at doing. We were not helping to create youth leadership; we merely recruited young people who were leaders already. Third and most important, relates to the first issue, this program’s design could never get to scale. The number of young people affected for the investment was simply too low.

Now jump forward to 2001 in one of my many treasured conversations with Ron Ansin, Founder of our Alexis de Tocqueville Society. I lament, once again, concerning that fact that United Way’s interactions with young people in a positive manner are far too limited. I note that we can with great certainty quantify the vast quantities of service delivery that we provide them after things in their lives have generally gone bad. It’s a good thing that we are there to do that, but in this day of trying to create IMPACT in our communities’ those services, while needed by them at the time, are generally are not addressing a route cause.

This time Ron introduces me to Youth Venture’s Executive Director who immediately came to my community eagerly looking to discover ways to promote the spread of this program. I quickly learn that this program is the very essence of what I had hoped that my first experience in youth leadership development would be……and more, very much more.

After hearing about the program’s early development in the US and the number of young people that were involved and were being very successful in their efforts to create change by working in groups to better their community I was sold. Knowing that these young people were not limited to the high performers but represented a very diverse group who appeared to have the common characteristic of wanting to be listened to about their way, not ours as adults, as to how to creatively help.

My vision quickly focused on the one natural place where I believe that there is the single largest concentration of young people in any community and this was, and still is, our school systems. After meeting with several school superintendents it was evident that despite the unending demands of performance on standardized testing that they are very much interested in community service programs and service learning in general. Several of them commented that were interested in developing such programs and were just exploring how to get started. United Way Youth Venture was launched in three schools in 2002 as a partnership with Youth Venture, local school systems and our United Way. Today we are now involved with eight schools in both middle and high schools.

There are currently 48 Venture operating with more than 500 young people currently participating. Approximately another 300 who have moved on to higher education or work. Our initial results are encouraging. The program has now spread to four other United Way Communities including our Co-Sponsors from Nashua.

So, if you have ever wondered where we are going to get the leaders who will be interested in being active participants in community and run our organizations, if you have ever thought about having a positive brand experience with a large number of young people, not to mention the supportive adults in our schools, but are not sure to go about the task, if you are wondering who will be there to care when care is needed, United Way Youth Venture is worth a very careful look.