Voices for Children

[This article originally appeared in Children's Voice, Vol. 12, No. 3,
May/June 2003, published by the Child Welfare League of America.]

Although approaching 50, Keith Hefner exudes the easy youthfulness of someone half his age. He tends to break into a friendly laugh midsentence, and with his slightly tousled head of strawberry blond hair, he would look more at home in a quiet beach town than in the airy downtown Manhattan loft that houses Youth Communication, Hefner's brainchild and mini publishing house. Paradoxically, Hefner's lifework and seeming fountain of youth centers on what has accelerated the aging of many parents and teachers-teenagers.

Perhaps what makes his constant interaction with teens invigorating as opposed to exhausting is that Hefner and his staff truly listen to young people, giving them an outlet for their stories and experiences.

Created in 1980 and funded largely by foundations and donations, Youth Communication produces two magazines and has published a handful of anthologies of student writing. The organization's flagship, New Youth Connections, is published every six weeks during the school year by a staff of about a 100 youth and is read by more than 200,000 middle and high school students.

In 1993, Youth Communication added Represent (formerly Foster Care Youth United (FCYU), a bimonthly magazine focused exclusively on the stories of youth in out-of-home care. Represent is filled with personal narratives, poetry, artwork, and interviews with experts that examine tough issues like domestic violence, sexual abuse, failures in the system, losing a parent, incarceration, independent living, and other issues that touch the lives of youth in care. The stories are honest, heartbreaking, and eye opening.

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Former Children's Voice managing editor Kristen Kreisher talked with Hefner at Youth Communication's office in New York City to find out more about its work and what those who serve youth in care can learn from it.

When you founded Youth Communication in 1980, and started Represent in 1993, what was your motivation, your vision?

When we started New Youth Connections, our first goal was to give teens a voice; to let adults know the issues that were important to teens and that the decisions being made then-especially the big budget cuts to schools and youth agencies-were devastating. The second was to provide teens an accurate reflection of their experiences. The adult media tend to either stereotype kids or make them invisible, and teen media tend to focus on celebrity and fashion. The real experiences of regular kids, especially poor kids, are never reflected back to them in the media.

The media is such a big part of our culture you can feel almost like you don't really belong if you don't see yourself in it. If you're an average kid in New York and the only images you see of yourself in the media are unemployed, pregnant, and criminal, which is the basic stereotype, I think it's psychologically harmful. We try to provide a voice in the magazine, and we try to provide a realistic portrayal of kids' lives, in which they can see themselves and their own struggles.

From time to time there were kids in foster care on the staff of New Youth Connections, but they almost never disclosed to the other kids that they were in care. I had thought being gay was probably the biggest stigma you could have as a teenager, but then I saw that teens in foster care were even more secretive about their status. Any stigma that powerful, I thought, needs to be dismantled.

So we asked, do we just integrate those stories into New Youth Connections, or do we start a separate magazine? In the end, we felt the stigma was so powerful, it would have been next to impossible to just tell the kids, now you can write about foster care. We thought we had to make it explicit. We decided to do our own magazine called Foster Care Youth United, and we were going to bust through the stereotypes by saying, "We're in foster care. We're writing about it. Our names and pictures are on our stories."

The stories in Represent are so brutally honest and personal. Do you have any trouble getting the kids to express themselves that freely? Is there any apprehension about putting their names and faces with these very personal stories?

We did focus groups to see if kids in care thought the magazine was a good idea. They liked it, but some adults told is that the magazine was illegal and that putting kids names and photos on stories would be doubly illegal. It was amazing how secretive the culture of foster care was

Most writers choose to put their names on their stories, but the decision isn't always clear cut. For example, the stories are often intensely personal descriptions of traumatic events. Although the writer may want her name on it that week, we can't predict how she will feel about it in five years. We have long discussions with the students about those issues. Sometime we insist that stories remain anonymous even when the writer wants his or her name on it.

The second issue is respecting the privacy of the people who are written about. If a teen writes about being sexually abused, we're not going to interview the abuser. We work on our stories for many months, and our adult editors are experts at separating fact from fiction. No one's ever said a story wasn't true, but we're still concerned about people's reputations.

We also remember that our distribution is largely controlled by the agencies. When stories are about generic problems within agencies-for example, poor group home staff-we don't usually name Agency X, because Agency X isn't really responsible for the fact that reimbursement rates are so low that they don't get good staff. If it's something very specific to an agency and really within their responsibility, we'll name them, but we may not get distributed there for a while. We want to improve foster care, but we're not out to crucify the agencies.

How do you help your writers channel their powerful stories and emotions into well-crafted pieces? How do youth respond to the editing process and the rewriting their editors ask them to do?

I'll give you an example. One teen wanted to write about why you should always wear a condom, and his first draft came back written like an STD and pregnancy prevention brochure. The editor told him, "This is not going to work," and had him complete a worksheet that asks what the writer wants to accomplish: "What do you want to write about?" "What will the reader get out of it?" and so on. The student wrote curt answers to all six questions, except the last, "What will you get out of writing this story?" For that, he wrote, "Nothing but the loss of my dignity." In the margin, the editor wrote, "EXPLAIN!"

By this time, the student had been working with the editor for several weeks and had begun to trust him. The student admitted that he got his girlfriend pregnant, and he's having a hard time being a part time dad to his son. Now you've got a story.

In his next draft, he began by describing the classic accident: He and his girlfriend had planned to go to a movie, but it was raining. They had used condoms before but didn't have one that day. But then the editor realized the baby was missing from the story. He wrote on the draft, "Your son? The last time you saw him? Describe."

In the next draft, the writer described hiding behind a car in front of his girlfriend's apartment and watching her walk down the street with the baby. Again, the editor wrote, "Explain." The next draft revealed the girl's mother wouldn't let him see his son, and in the three months since he started writing the article, his girlfriend had moved to Florida. The editor asked, "How does that make you feel?" He wrote, "I guess I'll never bounce my son on my knee or hear him call me dad."

So the piece went from an STD pamphlet, to a part-time dad story, to a story about loss, which is what he wanted to write about in the first place, but he couldn't access those emotions. It was the writing process that allowed him to begin to process his deepest feelings.

What elements do the editors look for?

A typical story in the mass media or an agency newsletter is: "Sally was in a tough spot because bad things had happened to her, and now Sally is going to Harvard." That's a story with a beginning and an end. There's no middle. Adults like those stories because they want to feel good about the ending. Kids hate those stories because they feel they don't measure up to the "ideal" ending. What kids want to read is the middle. They are interested in the struggle Sally went through, all those micro choices she made, and how they impacted her life.

Many of the stories are painful to read. As an adult, you want something better for these kids. You want the happy ending.

They're often painful to write, too. They don't gloss over the hard parts and jump to a happy ending. There often aren't happy endings. What's "happy" about the story is that the writer has survived in spite of enduring horrible experiences. Teens are inspired by the struggles, the middle section. They are amazed to see someone else has faced what they have faced and survived.

The stories only seem depressing if you've decided in advance how they should end. Kids hate that projection. It feels judgmental, like they're coming up short in the adult's eyes. I've seen a writer talk with great pride before an adult audience about her story and her courageous struggles, and then get totally deflated when someone in the audience says, "You're story made me so sad." The teen wasn't sad; she was proud. It's very important for adults to learn to value and honor teens' struggles as much as they do their achievements-not to pity them because of their hard lives.

Are any subjects off limits? Is there anything a writer can't write about?

Our only editorial rule is that no story can be written from vengeance. Stories have to be written from the standpoint of self-understanding and trying to understand other people. The magazine is not a weapon for personal attacks.

There are also times when the editors have felt a kid is still too close to a story, that not enough time has passed to reflect on it productively. We're always asking ourselves, "Might raising some of these issues do more harm than good?" For example, we've found that it is usually best to let a year or more elapse before writing about a traumatic event, like a rape. We have a file cabinet of abandoned stories.

Have you seen teens changed by the process of getting something out on paper or seeing something published?

The most common change is from seeing oneself as a victim to seeing oneself as a survivor of difficult circumstances. That transformation often occurs from week to week, from draft to draft.

In the early drafts, the student is often writing, "This happened to me and that happened to me." A common question the editor asks is, "When that happened, what did you do?" What the writer did, of course, is make a choice. It may have been a limited choice, but it was a choice. From draft to draft, the student begins to see that he made the better of two bad choices, and then the better of two more. That's why he is a survivor. That's why he's not in a worse situation. The student often goes from feeling like a passive victim to feeling like someone who makes the right decision in a pinch. That's a very powerful change.

In the 10 years you've been publishing Represent, what changes have you seen in foster care?

Foster care is a less stigmatizing experience than it was 10 years ago. We're not the only reason for that, but I think we've really helped reduce the stigma by publishing a magazine where teens stand up in a very public way and say, "We're in foster care, and these are our stories." Youth voices are being heard more.

Youth voices are being heard more. There's the advocacy group, California Youth Connection, and the statewide magazine, South Carolina Youth Connected. The Jim Casey program is establishing active youth boards in each of its target cities. My impression is that more agencies are finding ways to listen to youth and do it better than the old "speak out" model.

Staff tell us Represent helps them gain a better understanding of teens' thoughts and feelings, which makes them less likely to make an assumption or jump to a conclusion about a teen. It encourages them to probe, to listen.

What about policy changes?

It's impossible to draw a one-to-one connection from the magazine to policy changes. One link we've identified, however, is the Foster Care Independence Act, which was pushed by U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton [D-NY]. She was exploring foster care issues, and she met with a group from California Youth Connection. They told her their most important issue was transition to adult life. One youth, Alfred Perez, told her if she really wanted to understand the issue, she had to read the teens' own stories. He gave her his personal copy of The Heart Knows Something Different, the first anthology from our magazine. A CWLA staff member told me that Mrs. Clinton read it cover to cover on the plane back to Washington, DC. At the bill signing, she talked about the importance of hearing the teens' stories.

I am sometimes struck by how different teens' views are from official policy. I'm not saying the teens are right or wrong, but their ideas are sometimes unexpected. One example is neighborhood-based placement. In surveys and in contest entries submitted to Represent, the vast majority of teens say they do not want to be placed in their neighborhoods. They feel the neighborhood is part of their problem.

Another example is family foster care versus institutions. In our experience, most teenagers say they prefer group homes and congregate settings. The kids' sense is that the peers they meet in those congregate settings are a more reliable support network for them than foster parents. Do I think that's a good thing? I'm not sure, but that's what the kids say.

What are your goals for the future?

We're going to be much more assertive at promoting subscriptions nationally. We're already in 46 states, but circulation is thin outside New York and California. We ran a workshop in California last summer, and the teens wrote a ton of stories that we've been running all year long. We're considering doing similar projects in other states if we can find groups that want to work with us.

For each issue of Represent, we also produce a guide for staff on how to use the articles in independent living programs. We want to encourage more agencies to use it with teens and as a staff development tool. We're also preparing anthologies on selected topics for staff training and independent living classes.

Our next book, called In the System and In the Life, is about the gay experience in foster care. It has stories by gay teens in foster care, by straight teens who have been roommates and friends with gay teens, and by staff who work with gay teens. That book is really a guide for agencies that want to provide more sensitive and appropriate services for gay and lesbian clients.

We recently published another anthology, The Struggle to Be Strong, about building resilience in teens, and want to get it into more agencies. The working title of the book was Bouncing Back, but as we read the stories more closely, we realized there was no "back" to bounce to for many of these writers. We needed a better definition. What we eventually settled on was that resilience is persistence in the face of adversity. It's a definition that focuses on the process, not the outcome. It reflected the spirit of the stories. Adversity never goes away for these writers. The question for them is can they maintain their persistence? If they can, that's a gigantic victory. It will sustain them for the rest of their lives.

For more information, contact Youth Communication at 224 West 29th Street, Second Floor, New York, NY 10001, or visit them online at www.youthcomm.org.