Teen Writer Programs Scrutinize Social Issues

“Go to hell!” shouts 17-year-old Abram Boise, snapping necks to attention in the ornate, newly restored Librarians’ Reception Room at the Library of Congress, where an overflow crowd gathered recently to honor youth essay contest winners.

“‘What Up Nigga!’ Would You Say It?” read the headline above a teen-written article in the Boston-based Teen Voices magazine that probed the use of “nigga” as both epithet and “greeting.”

And a 16-year-old, in her article “Why Isn’t it Illegal?” in Inner 303, an in-your-face teen publication in Denver, asks “Why isn’t it illegal that Bill Gates has enough money to feed every poor child, but doesn’t?”

There are three examples of scattered local and national efforts by youth-serving agencies to promote social awareness among youth by encouraging them to write about, and offer solutions for, social problems affecting them. The emphasis is on teen writing as youth development.

“It’s a new expression … teen writing,” says Keith Hefner, founder and executive director of New York-based Youth Communication (YC), which publishes New Youth Connections (founded in 1980) and Foster Care Youth United (founded in 1993). “They need a public forum for sharing their experiences, exploring concerns – concerns that may have global significance.”

Scores of foundations have latched on to nonprofits that offer issue-relevant writing programs for youth aged 11 and up. The variety offered by these programs runs the gamut: incarcerated youth in San Francisco, poetry slams and publication of a quarterly magazine at an inner-city youth center in Denver, writing classes stressing youth and diversity in Minneapolis, and adolescent girls writing about topics that will define their adulthood in Teen Voice, the Boston-based quarterly magazine. They offer outlets for self-expression on topics ranging from sexual assault to homophobia, from sexism to the marketing of tobacco and alcohol to youth.

“Teenagers in the best schools haven’t had the training to write an op ed piece,” notes Hefner, who refers to YC’s publications as “uncensored, but not unbuttoned” – meaning that after teens have been trained by his staffers in journalism had its disciplines, they are not cramped over subject matter. He points to Rachael Swarns, South African bureau chief for the New York Times, as an example of an inquisitive and talented then 17-year-old in the YC program in 1984-85, who made good in the field of sociopolitical reporting.

‘Open to Change’

Boise’s opening line to his award-winning essay on juvenile violence, “Quick With the Fists,” establishes his adolescent anger and leads into a chronicle of a young bully at bay – himself—that ends with the line: “Youth violence is a big issues, and it decreases with one person at a time, and I have started with myself.” U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley sat in the audience applauding.

A high school dropout from Montana who obtained his GED in the National Guard’s Youth ChalleNGe program, Boise was selected by judges for the “Do the Write Thing Challenge Program 2000” to have his essay included in a bound volume of 28 youth –penned poems, essays and stories dealing with juvenile violence that will join the library’s permanent collection.

“We’ve got to listen to what kids have to say. We’d learn a lot,” suggests Marion Mattingly, national program director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign to Stop Violence (NCSV). “They don’t have an adult agenda and they’re open to change. Kids have great ideas.”

The essay effort began as a local program of NCSV in Washington, D.C., in 1994. Tow years later it went nationwide; it now has the participation, according to Mattingly, of more than 450 schools and nearly 19,000 students. Since 1997 it has received funding from the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (this year: $165,000). Other supporters include the U.S. Department of Education (in –kind services), the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and the Kuwait-American Foundation (as an acknowledgement “payback” for U.S. intervention in the Gulf War).

The ChalleNGe program, created by Congress in 1992 and now operating in 30 states, each year enters into the essay contest a proven talent pool of at-risk unemployed high school dropouts who have attained their GED and demonstrated writing ability while in the program. Half of those chosen for the Library of Congress volume were ChalleNGe graduates.

“We have a very structures 22-week quasi-military program (plus a one-year mentored follow-up) that features life-coping skills,” says Major Bob Stone, deputy director of outreach programs for reserve affairs. “We make them all write, because competent self-expression is a life skill.”

‘Not the Easter Bunny’

In Boston, Stone’s axiom has borne fruit for 10 years in the hard-hitting, Teen Voices, founded by youth worker Alison Amoroso. Adolescent girls—generally ages 14 and 15, and mostly from low-income neighborhoods such as Roxbury and Dorchester—regularly tackle a bill of fare that includes race issues, teen motherhood, sexual assault and disabilities.

“It is important that we encourage them to write at this time in their lives. Their cognitive ability kicks in after puberty. It’s the first time they look outside themselves,” observes Amoroso. “Teens are wonderful to work with, because they are idealistic and believe they can change the world.”

Celina DeLeon, at 22, the magazine’s senior editor, relates that she has seen teens “evolve” in their thinking while working a story. She recalls an article on lesbianism that evoked one of the two writers to declare, “I don’t believe in homosexuality!” DeLeon calmly responded that lesbians “are not the Easter Bunny,” because they do exist.

“It wasn’t long before the young lady, who is black, while preparing the article, began connecting the dots between homophobia and racism—how her original view of lesbians could be, with a twist, akin to a similar view held by a bigot who spewed hate against those of another race,” recalls DeLeon.

Teen Voice pays its staff of some 30 teen editors and writers $65 a month during the cycle that the quarterly goes to press. With an overall budgets of $700,000, the magazine gets the lion’s share of its funding from local foundations such as Hymes and the Bank Boston Charitable Trust.

“But for our outlet, the youngsters in the neighborhoods we recruit from would have no place to latch on to a journalism internships,” says DeLeon.

Letter from a Juvenile Jail

Conducting writing workshops for incarcerated youth in the San Francisco area, along with publishing a newspaper featuring their writings, has been the main function since 1996 of The Beat Within: A Weekly Publication of Writing and Art from the Inside.

“We have grown from six bimonthly workshops in the city to 35 weekly workshops spanning San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara counties—and our weekly paper has shot up from four pages to 80,” states Beat Within Director and Co-founder David Inocenio.

Inocenio and Sandy Close, executive director of the Pacific News Service (which calls itself an alternative news service), developed The Beat Within as a Pacific News publication written by and about kids who are locked up. With a $457,000 budget, they secured the backing of several local foundations, including S.H. Cowell, Walter F. Johnson and The California Wellness Foundation, along with the New York-based Open Society Institute, which supports similar efforts elsewhere under its Youth Media Initiative.

“We deal with all levels of incarceration and see some six to seven hundred kids per week,” notes Inocencio, who pointed out that newspapers are considered contraband in the juvenile halls. (“The authorities,” he says, “don’t wish the youth to see their names in stories about their crimes for fear the perpetrators will be glorified behind bars.”) As a consequence, Inocencio says, the youths are “hungry to read, hungry for information … They’ve become aware that they have been cut off.”

The 45-minute to two-hour weekly sessions teach kids how to draw on personal experiences to articulate stories and opinions. This approach has prompted critics to charge that Beat Within and similar programs fail the young writer because they do not apply journalistic standards or journalistic training.

“Cathartic” vs. Social Context

“Although these programs are certainly needed,” say Hefner, whose Youth Communications budget of $800,000 a year comes mostly from New York benefactors such as The New York Foundation and the Open Society Institute, “the publications tend to print short, opinionated shout-outs that are shallow. There is no research.”

Amoroso also makes a distinction between her Teen Voices and what she describes as the “cathartic” approach of The Beat Within-type publications. “our methodology is different from other publications that just publish opinions. We follow the process of placing critiques or analysis in the realm of social context.”

Inocenio claims not to hear these criticisms: “We get tons of support from judges, parole officers and the inmates themselves.”

Former inmate Siliva Mortenson, 26, is a firm supporter. The native Samoan, who has lived in California since childhood, began writing for a component of the paper, The Beat Without, three years ago – several years after he had been transferred out of Juvenile Hall to serve out his term in the California Youth Authorities system. Upon his release last year, he is now a Beat Within workshop facilitator and editor.

“In writing for the paper, I helped wake myself up,” comments Mortenson. He wrote pieces on the “three-strikes-you’re-out” law and other aspects of juvenile justice. He “woke up” to the extent that he got his GED, joined the paper, and now plans to pursue a liberal arts degree. “Finding tools of self-expression worked for me,” he says.

During the time Mortenson has been a staffer, he says, some 30 released inmate writers have been hired at $7 per hour (for varying hours). “They used us as a stepping stone to go on to college or enter other fields,” he says.

Sassy in Minneapolis

Her e-mail name –“slamgranny”—highlights her fame as a slam master at community poetry slams. Her real names is Carolyn Holbrook, and she is the executive director of SASE: The Write Place. (SASE stands for Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, part of the writer’s kit that accompanies submissions, and is pronounced “sassy”).

At 55, youth worker Holbrook is proud that the seven-year-old nonprofit she heads is community-based and started out of her living room. It has a budget of $50,000 for it youth writing component (provided by local foundations such as McKnight). SASE also offers classes, workshops, readings and mentoring programs for school detention programs and social studies in the area’s middle and high schools. Included among the 10 sites served are community organizations such as three Boys & Girls Clubs in Minneapolis and two juvenile detention facilities through their youth intervention and crime prevention programs.

Holbrook maintains that “writing is a skill and capacity that is a tool for both personal and community empowerment.” A black woman, Holbrook has used what she terms “guerrilla” tactics to cut red tape to get her program into what she describes as “diverse” communities.

She tells of the program she started at Patrick Henry High School during the Saturday morning four-hour detention period set aside for students who were deemed in need of extra punishment. The class, mostly black, was meat for her potatoes.

“I called our sessions ‘The Breakfast Club’ and brought donuts to the class. After a few classes, one youngster insisted on composing a poem for the first time in his life. It dealt with a drive-by shooting he had witnessed that plagued his mind,” Holbrook recounts.

The poem was printed in the local paper and, says Holbrook, it appeared that a cloud had lifted out of the youth’s life. “He saw his work in the paper and his behavior in school improved dramatically.”

Denver: Inner 303

“This ain’t no ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul,” confesses David DeForest Stalls, founder and director of Inner Places, Inc., in Denver. Stalls, a former Dallas Cowboys defensive end who wears two Super Bowl rings, has put together funding to operate two youth ventures that, according to him, exceed his former glory.

Opened in 1994, The Spot is a youth center that has defied the city department of recreation’s bet that it would not and could not succeed. It has excelled beyond its original expectations, becoming a creative outlet and a gang-neutral environment for city kids.

The following year, Inner 303 (Denver’s area code), an uncensored unedited quarterly magazine by and for teens, took flight and became a cause celebre. With 3,000 copies distributed free in the Denver area, it has found its way across the country and found a national audience.

“So much so,” says Stalls, “we’re deluged with article submissions by teens that run higher from those outside the area than from those inside. The magazine is a tool for young people who wish to write poetry or articles about rape, suicide or being shot.”

An article by Sarah Bardwell for the current issue, titled “Why Isn’t it Illegal?”, poses the Bill Gates question.

Again, local foundations such as the Piton and the Rose Family Foundation pony up the $40,000 needed to publish the magazine.

Ironically, Stalls also received a grant from the state’s $3.6 million Youth Crime Prevention and Intervention program, which was set up by the late Colorado State Sen. Tony Grampsas (R). Three years ago, Grampsas insisted (and had the votes) that this program must be set up or he would stall a $360 million prison construction bill. (“How’s that for priorities?” queried Stalls.)

“We pay magazine contributors $10 if the piece is submitted on paper and published, $20 if it comes in by e-mail and published.”

“What I like,” says Stalls, “is that our writers are intense and real.”

Resource

Silvia Mortenson
Facilitator/Editor
The Beat Within
660 Market St, Ste. 210
San Francisco, CA 94104
(415) 438-4755
www.pacificnews.org

Carolyn Holbrook
Artistic/Executive Director
SASE: The Write Place
711 W. Lake St., Ste. 211
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 822-2500
www.mtn.org/sase

David DeForest Stalls
Director
Inner Places, Inc.
2100 Stout St.
Denver, CO 80205
www.thespot.org

Alison Amoroso
Executive Director
Teen Voices
515 Washington St., 6th Fl.
Boston, MA 0211-1759
(617) 426-5505
www.teenvoices.com

Marion Mattingly
National Program Director
National Campaign to Stop Violence
1120 G St., N.W., Ste. 990
Washington, DC 20005
(800) 256-0235

Alexander, Bill. "Teen Writer Programs Scrutinize Social Issues." Youth Today, October 2000, p. 1.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.