Kids First! Coalition ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND The Kids First! Coalition (KF!C) is a joint effort of six of Oakland’s leading youth development agencies: East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC), Narcotics Education League (NEL) Centro de Juventud, People United for a Better Oakland (PUEBLO), West Oakland Health Center’s Violence Prevention Project, YouthALIVE!’s Teens on Target, and Centro Legal's Educational Empowerment Program. KF!C’s mission is to develop the leadership and community impact capacities of youth organizations through collaborative skills trainings, collective and individual reflection, and concrete community impact experiences. The collaborating agencies draw on more than 140 years of collective experience working with youth, a longtime presence in the areas we serve, and three years experience with collaborative projects and activities. Together, our organizations provide a year-round leadership training program for 13 to 21-year-old youth from Oakland’s most at-risk neighborhoods. Our 1998 community impact project focuses on student rights and school safety. In late 1995, PUEBLO, EBAYC, Centro, and a dozen other groups joined together to launch the KIDS FIRST! Initiative, the ballot measure that created the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth (OFCY), which has been the most significant gain in youth policy advocacy work in the last 25 years. Young people played a central role in the massive grassroots effort which led to the passage of the Initiative. Their hands-on civic participation and leadership training including gathering signatures, educating voters, and meeting with public officials about the Initiative. In early 1997, following the passage of the Kids First! Initiative, youth leaders and adult staff from the collaborating organizations met to plan a third summer leadership program. This planning committee met weekly from February to June designing a comprehensive leadership institute for youth organizers. The program ran from late June until early August, when it graduated 26 youth leaders, ages 13 to 21, at a community presentation ceremony. The issue focus of the most recent project was student rights and school safety, which participants identified after a lengthy issue identification process. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION The Kids First! Coalition Youth Leadership Institute is an innovative and outcome-oriented leadership development program which stresses multi-racial cooperation and hands-on skill development to build the capacity of the participating organizations to train and organize youth leaders to implement community impact projects. While operating over the past three years primarily as a Summer Institute with some supporting year-round activities, in 1998, the program will operate on a full-time, year-round basis. The program's participants come from the six participating collaborative members. Each agency selects a team of six to eight 13 to 21-year-olds from within their own programs to participate in the project. All participants make a one-year commitment to the program and most end up staying all four years or in some cases, until they leave for college. Each agency also selects one or two experienced members to serve as "team leaders," who participate in both the program and the staff meetings and function as both mentors to the youth and liaisons between the youth and staff. In addition, each agency contributes an adult staff member one afternoon per week to provide support to the project. Program planning is led by the KF!C Collaborative Board and includes representatives from each participating organization. The group decides the number of participants, focus and content of the training curriculum, types of multi-media projects, and other issues such as stipends, and planning the Team building Retreat. The coordinator executes the logistical arrangements including contracts with training consultants, preparing outreach materials, and serving as the clearinghouse for information about the program. The program begins in June with the participants and accompanying staff attending a three-day orientation, training and team-building retreat outside of Oakland. The training covers critical leadership development areas including peer education, meeting skills, and cross-cultural awareness through workshops and exchanges. Participants meet in teams four afternoons per week during the summer and twice per week during the school year. At regular periods during the summer and school year, "check-ins" facilitated by the team leaders and staff provide a chance to give feedback into the program and continue to build community. The curriculum, which has been refined over the past three years, builds capacity in five basic areas, which are varied each week. The training is done by staff members and youth of the participating agencies, KF!C project staff, and independent consultants. The training areas are:
Community Impact Efforts: The skills development, team building and education components are designed to build the participants' capacity to take action on an issue which has significant impact in the community. By organizing around an immediate issue, the participants are provided concrete opportunities to put their training into practice immediately in order to benefit the entire community. It provides ambitious goals for the participants to reach, and requires them to talk with and listen to a broad range of youth and adults. In addition, it demonstrates the importance of effective civic participation and the potency of young people acting collectively to change their environment. Currently the youth members are using their multi-media tools (see below) to educate middle and high school students about students rights issues in order to build for a community impact effort to improve the safety of students at school and to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion of students. |