Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

Something powerful happens when we as educators approach a young person's space, like their afternoon dance club, or hip hop group, or virtual world, and acknowledge it as being worth something. When we consider their cultural competencies, and what is important to them. When we harness their unique competencies for something that uniquely counters all of the negativity, pressure, or influences that are concurrently constructing their world.

In the work of the Online Leadership Program, we are recognizing that the enormous creativity, energy and spirit of our young people means something. And that it means something in all of the different forms it takes. It means something for the young person that only is engaged when she has a camera in her hand. Or for the young person that is struggling in school but confident in an after school fireside workshop. It matters tor the young person that isn’t sure of herself or who she wants to be, but knows that others are just like her, across the world, and she gets to seem them in the virtual world she logs in to every night. For a person that hates English class, but feels whole in a hip hop project… That matters.

It is something powerful when you say that every young person matters. It is of more importance when you do something to make sure that the young person knows that they matter. That is what youth development is. They are engaged. And when they are engaged they are a force to be reckoned with. They know it and they prove it. We are in their space, and so their space means something, not just to them, but to the world. They mean something to the world.

When I was in high school I learned much less physics and much more about creative ways to skip school. I wasn’t engaged. I didn’t connect to what I was learning. Instead, I learned how to fake a clinic pass and dodge security on my way to the parking lot. I was on absence probation in high school. The principal would literally come to my classes everyday to make sure when I was there. When I got to college, I started to take interdisciplinary courses, thinking through my experiences. My graduate experience was the same, I was challenged. I was inspired by the world around me. I was an all A student. Not that my grades were what mattered. But I learned that I mattered.

Connecting a young person to their learning, so that they care, about themselves and the world around them, and being something in that world, that is what makes our work mean something. It means something to the world we are preparing our kids for and it certainly means something to the young people that begin to feel a part of it.