Views & News
Interviews, essays, podcasts, news from both inside and outside Youth Catalytics: you’ll find it all here. We welcome your ideas, input, conjectures, rejoinders and anything else you have say. We’re a community of professionals who care about young people, and want the information and opinions expressed here to be as vital and vibrant as they are.
Add your expertise to our latest Views & News feature: Voices From The Field. Contact Mindi Wisman for more information at mwisman@youthcatalytics.org
YouthMapping: the power of a fact-finding experience
How about training young people to investigate issues and resources in their communities? How about teaching them how to collect and fact-check information, provide background and context, summarize it all for their peers — and do it in a way guaranteed to make adults take note?
Helping young people cope with post-lockdown stress
Almost anyone who knows someone in middle or high school sees signs of the stress that is part of adolescence; I’ve talked with young people who cut, whose hair fell out in patches. But in these pandemic months, our stress has been as self-contained as everything else
#MeToo, and what it probably won’t mean for poor girls
About 10 years ago, we started hearing from our direct-service colleagues that the girls in their programs were facing new pressures to look and act in sexual ways. While children in state care had always been at higher risk of sexual abuse than other kids, with all the attending behavioral fallout, it seemed like something new was happening. Something in the culture, perhaps.
Teaching about trauma in schools and communities that have experienced it
Healing a system is not very different from healing an individual; it starts with awareness.
From our notebook: ‘I wouldn’t trust anyone, unless they could feel my pain
‘I’m 14 and dating a 35-year-old. My mom called the cops on me and not the dude.’
Podcast: Giving young people the chance — and the budget — to improve their community
These teens have made more than $285,000 in grants to over 70 nonprofit organizations in Worcester County, MA. Find out how in this 2017 podcast.
Politics aside, this is what remains
In the 1970s, our field barely existed. Now it does, because we built it. And we’re not simply fumbling along, doing our best. We’re being effective. There’s incalculable power in that.
How do you shut a girl up?
One look at her page and I could see that Savannah wasn’t a pudgy 10-year-old in pigtails any more. She was a pretty, if somewhat hard-looking, teenager. But I could still see the little girl underneath.
The questions posed by ‘Teen Mom’
In the first episode, we meet the mom-to-be, a regular, fresh-faced girl from some small town in Kentucky or Texas or South Dakota. Somehow she’s gotten five months pregnant, and everyone — family, friends, boyfriend, the girl herself — still seems a little dazed.
What little girls want, and what we want for them
It’s easy for adults like me to be outraged and wounded in advance for little girls like the one I’m describing, who after all are learning at such a tender age to value themselves only through the appraising eyes of their peers and and the frankly predatory older boys who seem to beckon them ever closer
