The Evolution of Youth Empowerment at a Youth Newspaper

[This article originally appeared in Social Policy magazine, Summer, 1988.]

by Keith Hefner

As a 15-year-old in 1971, I started an organization called Youth Liberation, which had the modest goals of taking over the Ann Arbor, Michigan, public schools to run them "in the interests of the students," and building a nation wide movement for youth civil rights, akin to the Black Liberation movement and the growing women's movement. If we happened to spark a nationwide uprising, as the youth of France had done just three years earlier, so much the better.

Like most 15-year-olds, I thought young people would do a much better job of running the world—or at least their own small corner of it—than the adults who were telling us what to do. Also like most people my age, my view of the world was as narrow as my own experiences up to that time.

Always hopeful that there would be a resurgence of 1960s—style youth activism, underground newspapers, and other anti—establishment activities, I kept at Youth Liberation for eight years, publishing a monthly magazine of children's rights and youth organizing and a series of books on topics like How to Start a High School Underground Newspaper and Student and Youth Organizing, which I hoped would give young people around the country some information and inspiration they needed to fight back against unjust authority.

Youth Liberation died in 1979, unnoticed by most, but ennobled by media attention. As the Associated Press described it, I "retired" at the age of 24, a "radical has-been." Quite by chance, within a year I was starting a newspaper called New Youth Connections (NYC), to be written by and for high school students in New York City. The paper was an opportunity to put into practice, as an adult facilitator, some of the ideas I had had about youth empowerment as a teenager.

It has been a rocky road, one in which many of my assumptions and most cherished beliefs have been dashed on the hard heads of teenagers who do not share them. However, my respect for the ability of young people to confront daunting obstacles in constructive and "empowering" ways—when given opportunities and encouragement—has been reaffirmed on a regular basis.

What Is a Youth-Run Newspaper?

My charge was to create a youth-run newspaper. The implementation of that charge left lots of room for interpretation. Let me describe how it was evolved over the years to try to explain, in practice, what youth empowerment has meant and some of the forms it has taken in one organization.

First a caveat: I have never particularly liked the term "youth empowerment" because it seems to imply that well-intentioned adults can "empower" powerless young people. Adults can no more empower young people than whites can empower Blacks, or men empower women. Empowerment comes about largely through self-activity, not the actions of others. However, adults can help create and structure experiences in ways that can facilitate youth empowering themselves. Following are some of the ways we did that at NYC.

We were lucky that our project was to create a newspaper. Many characteristics that most good youth programs share are essential to producing a newspaper: a newspaper is a tangible product that garners public recognition; producing it requires a wide range of talents (everything from licking stamps to investigative reporting), which means that it attracts a diverse group of youngsters; and its periodicity encourages reflection and self-criticism so that one can improve from month to month.

Since the Newspaper was to be a youth empowerment project, we decided that young people would select and serve as editors, the key decision-makers on a publication. During the first three years of producing NYC, the youth staff spent an enormous amount of time on the process of managing the editorial board: defining and redefining the criteria for editors, nominating them, lobbying for the votes of peers, voting for them, and threatening to remove those who did not do their jobs. The adult staff (both of us) observed from the sidelines.

That seemingly endless process reinforced the idea that NYC was really a youth-run newspaper. The two adult staff would wait patiently at the office until midnight, when the caucusing for editorial positions was done and elections were ready to be held (among the half-dozen students who were passionate enough to stay). We observed as editors were elected, some of whom were competent and some of whom were not. We would generously work all weekend to complete the tasks that elected editors sometimes neglected. We often acquiesced when youth editors treated young writers in ways that did not result in the best possible story being written. In short, the adults put up with practically any foolishness, as long as it was related to youth running the paper.

The positive side was that the young people on the staff had significant input, not only into the editorial content of NYC, but also the management aspects of the program—hiring, office hours, and rules, assignment of stories and artwork, and the "tone" in the office. For the youngsters who were suited for management tasks, or who fought to be included in them (always a relatively small group), there were tremendous benefits. They learned the nuts and bolts of how to create an organization. They learned to argue their point of view, listen to another point of view, test their perceptions against reality, evaluate problems and implement remedies, and unite an extremely diverse group of people in a common purpose.

Many of them mastered the interpersonal skills needed to function assertively and effectively in any organization. Discussions were often torturous, but just when they seemed interminable, the discipline of deadlines meant that decisions had to be made or we would have no newspaper to argue over. As long as we were able to keep that important objective in mind—to publish a newspaper that served the needs of New York teens—activities or practices that unduly hindered our progress toward our deadlines were usually discouraged, and practices that helped inch us toward that objective slowly became routine.

However, there were many problems with this approach. An organization can not indefinitely allow meetings to expand from Friday afternoon to Friday night to Saturday morning. Any organization that is run that way soon is populated by only a cadre of true believers. More importantly, our structure of teen editors was fatally flawed. Our first editor was a natural leader who was elected by acclamation. We (the two adults) did not realize at the time that a student like her comes along about once or twice a decade. When she did not come along the next year, or the next, a great deal of the cohesiveness of the teen staff vanished.

We were initially reluctant to step into the vacuum, fearing we would inhibit the youth-run nature of the program, but without a commonly recognized leader, the other editorial positions drifted. No one had the authority to tell people what they had to do to generate good articles and get to press on time. What had been lively editorial discussions turned to bickering. In meetings it became harder and harder to distinguish between legitimate editorial criticism and veiled personal attacks.

Furthermore, we were coming to a turning point in our organizational life. For the first two or three years we were in a building phase. There were no rules, except those we invented, and that meant that every teenager who walked in the door was invited to participate in the most basic decisions about how things were done. By the third year, however, we were beginning to mature as an organization. The question of whether students could wear headphones in the office was settled. (It was prohibited because everyone was tired of screaming to announce incoming phone calls.) The publication schedule was settled. The name of the newspaper was settled (though I never liked it). The "established" teen staff, as well as the adult staff, tired of the notion that simply because NYC was youth-run each new group of young people who walked in the door could redesign it from the ground up. Youth-run, we decided, did not mean that precedents could be lightly overturned.

A related problem was that since we had largely passed the phase of creating the organization, we had much less opportunity to involve young people substantively in learning the skills of organization—building. We reached a point where we were having many long discussions around management issues that did not result in any change and left teen and adult staff feeling frustrated. We realized that it was misleading to continue to act as if new young people coming into the program had a great deal of input into how it was managed.

But how could NYC remain a "youth empowerment" program in its more mature organizational phase? First, we began to change the emphasis from youth involvement in the managerial aspects of the program to youth editorial control over the content of the paper. Though young people always determined the editorial content of NYC, in the early years the energy devoted to editorial issues frequently took a back seat to managerial issues and backstage power plays.

Second, my views of youth empowerment were evolving. One of my basic assumptions when I started NYC was that most young people had a fairly high level of skills (speaking, reading, writing) that they could exercise in their pursuit of power. The important issue, I thought was how they directed their talents.

NYC was a rude awakening to me. I was stunned by the inability of bright, hard—working young people to articulate their thoughts, to write a passable paragraph, or gather the information they needed to support a point of view. In New York, I realized (and probably just about everywhere else) a critical component of any empowerment strategy had to be the teaching of basic skills. It would have been pure tokenism to tell young people that, for example, by being on the editorial board of NYC they would have any real power, we didn't at the same time help them acquire the skills they needed to influence and exercise power beyond the confines of our little program.

In some ways, our earlier notion of youth leadership began to have a hollow ring. In too many instances, electing someone to the editorial board of NYC without training her in the skills to exercise that power and responsibility just made her a bully—momentarily powerful, but only by virtue of a temporary position rather than real skills and hard—earned authority.

During the phase of our program in which young people were heavily involved in managerial issues, the acquisition of basic skills for the vast majority of students left much to be desired. So did the quality of the publication, and our product was becoming more and more important as our readership grew to over 200,000 a month. Our early concentration on process and internal politics had left too little time for what I began to see as the building blocks of empowerment—teaching skills like research, writing, and public speaking, and wielding our editorial power in ways that would help teens in our rapidly growing audience to lead better lives.

NYC is now a mixed bag. On the one hand, we have a highly structured environment. Office rules, established long ago by the teen staff, are generally not open for discussion; they are imposed on each new generation of teen staff by the people who remain constant, the adults. Editing standards such as readability levels are also imposed on each new group of teen staff. Each new writer goes through a two—week indoctrination on the history of NYC, its purpose, its rules, and its writing style and standards.

The first group of students created the history and conditions that are now imposed. Current students, rather than learning that the editorial content of NYC is determined by teens through a process of actually struggling to determine it, are told by adults that NYC is teen run. I think that few of them actually believe it at first.

But after we have established that the adults know a great deal about how to produce NYC, and have very definite ideas about how to do it, we begin editorial discussions, and that's where things begin to happen. The teens quickly see that the adult editors are out of touch with what is happening in youth culture. I can see the shock of recognition in each new group of students: "These adults may be setting the rules about how I behave in this office, but we're the ones who are going to decide what goes in the paper."

They soon realize that they have the power to write about what interests them and their peers, and that the adults are the facilitators, charged with helping them learn the skills they need to do that effectively. At that point—when students feel confident that they are running the show—there is an explosion of discussion and debate that must rival the intensity and thoughtfulness of any editorial board in the nation.

Contrary to my earlier views of youth empowerment, which focused on managerial issues, I now think that most of the management of a program is best left to the adults. Furthermore, it seems like the students are relieved not to have that responsibility. Instinctively they know that they are not very good at it—they haven't had the experience they need to do it well, and to really master it takes a longer period of experience with the world than the one or two semesters they have with us. But they do know what their own concerns are, that few people take those concerns seriously, and that they now have the opportunity to persuade a huge audience to share their concerns. Anyone who reads NYC would have to agree that they do it extremely well.

After nine years of running the paper, I recognize that we have lost the sense of excitement that comes from people consciously designing their environment to suit their needs. However, we have constructed an environment that allows young people a robust expression of their interests and provides them with the skills they need to effectively promote those interests in public debate through the newspaper. The training we provide and the newspaper we publish are both far superior to that we provided when we started.

We may appear to be somewhat less of a youth empowerment program than we were at the beginning, especially because some of the formal trappings of power, like the youth editorial board, have withered. But in another sense, we have enhanced and expanded the reach of our "empowerment" effect. In the early years, most of the impact of our program was on the small group of teens who participated directly in it. We served those teens well, but could not claim to be doing much more.

When we began to feel a greater responsibility to our audience, a nice balance was achieved, in which "empowerment" in the program began to be seen both in individual terms (what we could provide for teens on the staff) and social terms (how we could best serve an audience). The readers have benefited from that shift, and I believe that the broadening of vision that was required of the teen staff, plus our intensified focus on teaching skills, make the graduates of our program much better equipped for empowerment as adults.

Youth Empowerment Programs:
Characteristics and Caveats

Decision-Making: Young people must have significant decision-making authority, especially in the areas where their experience is likely to make their contributions especially unique and valid. In any program that is apt to survive, there will also be important areas where the young people will not have decision-making power. In these areas, adults can still involve young people by insuring that the adult decision-making process is relatively transparent, so the teens can see what is going on. That makes teens feel included and helps prepare them for ultimately making those decisions in another setting.

At NYC, young people have the greatest voice in editorial content which is significant power in a publishing organization. They have less input in other areas. For example, I do most hiring, but teens are involved in hiring their direct supervisor and the managing editor (and have twice vetoed my choice for that position). I determine the budget and salaries, but explain my decisions in a line-by-line discussion with each new group of teen staff.

• A Product: It is helpful for any youth program to have a product: a paper, an event, a play-something to aim for, to show the public, and to evaluate. In addition, a product forces everyone involved to think beyond the confines of the organization to an audience whose needs should be served in some way by the product.
  
  
• Skills Training: A youth empowerment project should teach formal skills in addition to whatever else it does. One of the most common perversions for the youth empowerment notion is to install young people on boards and commissions, without teaching them how to research the work of the body on which they serve, without teaching them about the dynamics of such groups, without teaching them how to take notes, to speak in public, to formulate an opinion based on facts. Tokenism is not youth empowerment.
  
  
• A Chance to Succeed: Failure is overrated as a learning experience: an opportunity for success is much better. Adults who want to help "empower" young people have an obligation to help define realistic objectives and devise a workable plan for reaching them. Even a project with a long term goal like abolishing apartheid can be designed so that the participants will have many successful experiences-enough to balance the inevitable setbacks of life. It is an abdication of responsibility to encourage young people to attempt a project and then not provide the support they need for a reasonable chance of success. Failure is much more likely to result in passivity and cynicism than in a desire to do better next time.
  
  
• Committed Adults: Youth empowerment projects are rarely youth-initiated; it is an irony of such projects that the critical variable in their success is usually the efforts of talented, dedicated adults. Find a good youth empowerment project, and behind it you will find an adult who either began it or is passionate about it. It is the adult willingness to initiate and persevere that inspires young people. Adults who sit around waiting for youth to initiate a project that they can assist will wait a long time.
  

Another irony of youth empowerment projects is that most have a healthy dose of adult direction. Youth leadership, like adult leadership, is a very rare essence. At NYC, when students were elected editor-in-chief who were not ready for the demands of the role, chaos reigned. Our solution was to abandon the position. Several years later when another truly gifted leader appeared in the group, the force of her personality and leadership skills resulted in her playing the role of "the editor-in-chief," even though the position no longer formally existed.

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Keith Hefner founded Youth Communication in 1980. From 1971 to 1979 he directed Youth Liberation Press, where he co-edited several books, including Student and Youth Organizing, Young People and the Law, How to Start a High School Underground Newspaper, and Growing Up Gay.