The Involvement of Youth in Community Development

Naomi Dutse

3054271

Reading Response #2

IDS-2110-001

Week 9

This week’s readings and class group presentation happened to be about the involvement of youth in community development. When youths are engaged in organizing activities that will promote social change especially from the grassroot level, some community development can be assured during the process. Christens and Dolan (2011, p. 529) highlighted four distinctive characteristics of youth engagement which are; the focus on youth circumstances, the use of cooperative enterprise by the youth to push influential people and institutions to proceed with community level change, the youth making sure that there is a collective decision being made when deciding the issues to address based on how pressing the matters are to them and finally the presence of adult support while the youth head their decision making process. These factors are highly beneficial to the process of getting an efficient outcome from the youth involvement in community development.

Nygreen, Kwon and Sanchez (2006, p. 113) bring it to the attention of their readers of their article that they learnt based on their being adult allies with PARTY, TNL and AYPAL, they learnt that it is important to acknowledge race, class and gender, strengthen allies with adults, create safe spaces, and build trusting relationships.  The first point being that it is important to acknowledge race, class and gender is very important because while it can be overlooked most of the times when it comes to youths, their are still racial issues, gender issues, and class issues that can cause separation even within the youths. These different issues also have had an impact on how the society sees people and so in order to be able to have youth be involved in community development issues of gender, race and class have to be acknowledged and respect for one another must be present. The alliance between the youth and adults should be mutual in the sense that there should be respect from both sides and the adults should still give the youths room to deliberate on matters that they find to be important. The presence of the adult is not meant to be noticed as authoritative but rather as a care guide. Safe spaces are also very valuable because they give the youth the liberty and freedom to engage with one another socially without the fear of being judged or criticized. To me the most important is the ability to build trusting relationships because if there is no trust within the youths and even the adults, there is no security for the progress of the involvement of the youth.