Stepping Stones

I have being mulling over ideas to encourage or provoke youth service practitioners to use our soon to be launched blog. My Project is expanding our learning community so that practitioners who deliver services to youth will be able to contribute to our blog. The young people we serve are youth experiencing poverty and homelessness and our blog will be the online component of our Learning Community. After viewing the previous Serendipity post from Teemu Arina, I’m getting inspired to try out some new strategies and use our blog to involve young people in a more intentional way, especially as individuals with great potential and valid stories to share.

One of the challenges (there are too many to list here) is that youth service practitioners are overwhelmed with the intensity of their work and like practitioners in the journalism, education or other public service sectors, using web 2.0 tools are far from their mindset let alone practice. Regardless of their readiness or interest in using these web 2.0 tools, the potential and opportunities for reaching young people by engaging them with these tools are huge. In many situations the youth served by these practitioners, are using many of the tools already. It is incumbent on our sector and ourselves as practitioners to start using these tools in our practice both in the field in within our respective organizations.

Here are a few ideas that I will test out with practitioners in our Project and outside our Project.

• Request that practitioners ask youth (client they serve) if they can record (either podcast or take notes and then post later) a story that reflects a situation where they overcame a difficult period or experience and who around them helped them through this experience. This is just an example of a question to ask. Any story question could be used by the practitioner as they would know best what story might best acknowledge the assets and strengths of the youth. It would be important to have the story recognize the young person’s talents and abilities or convey a message of accomplishment. The practitioner would also request if the youth would permit the publication of this story on our blog so that others might learn from this story.
• Ask practitioners to post a brief story to our blog about the reason they are motivated to work in the youth service field or what was the underlying event that caused them to choose their career.
• Ask practitioners to share a story that reflects the greatest challenges they see in their sector as youth attempt to negotiate their way through and into the community.

I will be adding more ideas to this theme over the coming weeks. This is an area where my work and social networking activities are merging. I think it’s good for me to be more public with my work activities activities especially as our Project blog starts to take shape.