Ready by 21 and Search Institute announced a contest, Take the Challenge Home, at the 2009 Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth conference in an effort to encourage HC • HY initiatives to start using Ready By 21 tools and resources.
Each award recipient receives $5,000 in funds that can be used for “taking the challenge,” as well as $1,000 in Search Institute survey services. The awarded communities will assist Ready by 21 and Search Institute by providing feedback about what it was like working with bottom-up and top-down styles of leadership.
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One of the communities to jump at the chance to take on this challenge was Hampton, Virginia.
Cindy Carlson, Director of the Hampton Coalition for Youth, describes the challenge as a chance to rethink their community’s approach to youth development. “Our city is at a crossroads in terms of our youth agenda. I think it’s time for us to re-look at where we’re headed, what our framework is, what our message is, and how we mobilize around that,” said Carlson. “We needed an umbrella under which to go through this process and Take the Challenge Home has provided that.”
The Hampton community has been working with the assets since 1995, with the Coalition for Youth, a department of local government, leading their asset-building efforts. Carlson reports that the Coalition was first intrigued by the assets because they were looking for a way to communicate a positive youth development message that was inclusive of everyone in the community.
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“We were looking for a way to do public awareness that had some sticking power, said Carlson. “I heard Peter Benson speak and was intrigued by the asset message because it was so concrete and so universal and because it described youth development principles in a way that anyone in the community could see they had a part in.”
Over time, the Developmental Assets have become a common language for the community. For example, it became common practice for the city manager to ask someone receiving city funds about which of the assets they were pledging to build with their work. “We became a community that intuitively understands the concept of positive youth development,” said Carlson.
See how Hampton won the Josten’s Our Town Award
After 15 years of asset building, Hampton is in need of a new way of looking at their youth agenda, and Carlson hopes that the Ready by 21 challenge will provide the needed boost. “What may be an outcome of this is looking for ways to get refocused across the community on some specific outcomes,” said Carlson. “I think people are asking for that and this is something that will be helpful for us.”
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Furthermore, working with the top-down style of Ready By 21 and the bottom-up style of asset building is not a new concept to the city of Hampton. “We’ve been playing on that balance for years,” said Carlson. “Our original coalition was very community-based. We became a department of local government and maintained community involvement in a lot of the things that we do. I think it’s always a balance of how things we do here are driven.”
As Hampton takes on the Ready By 21 Challenge to rethink their community’s approach to youth development, they hope to become an even better place for kids to grow up.
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