Janice Gruendel on Reframing Public Views of Youth

The Forum for Youth Investment

December 1, 2001

Reframing Youth Issues in Connecticut

In 1995, four women — each with many years of experience working on behalf of children, Shelley Geballe, Janice Gruendel, Nancy Meyer Lustman and Judith Solomon, formed Connecticut Voices for Children — an organization based on the belief that Connecticut could take
better care of its children. CT Voices for Children seeks to promote the well-being of Connecticut’s young people through high-quality research and public policy analysis, an active communications program, a commitment to promoting youth leadership and youth voice, and effective citizen
mobilization and organizational collaboration.

Janice Gruendel, co director of CT Voices, recently spoke with the Forum about state-level advocacy work, Connecticut’s new prevention legislation and the need to reframe the public perception of youth as a primary step in creating coordinated youth policies.

Forum: You were one of the early participants in the National Center for Children in Poverty’s LIFT [Let’s Invest in Families Today] program. Tell us how having this policy changed your work on behalf of young children and how
it might be applied to youth?

JG: Poverty is probably the biggest issue on which everything else rests. The National Crime Prevention Council
(NCPC) brought national credibility to that issue. I think
we’ve helped each other understand poverty and its impact on kids.

The next step that we need to do is to bring into Connecticut some folks from out of state who have already
worked on the issues of changing the message frame
around young people nationally and in individual states.
The general tone is that adults are scared of young people
and the national polling data shows that there is an
incredible rush to punishment.

We need to recast adolescence not as a fearful time, but
as a time of normal development with certain kinds of
benchmarks and certain kinds of supports that families
need. We need to do that reframing in a very big way here.

Forum: As you look at the reframing issue around youth, what are some of the strategies you are currently using?

JG: One piece that we’re doing that will really inform the way we think about youth is that we’ve been looking at
kindergarten suspension data. Two years ago we suspended
500 kindergarteners and 1,500 first graders. It’s
the start of a “no tolerance” policy at the beginning of
children’s experiences in school and that rush to punishment
carries through and becomes very pronounced when you’re looking at teen behaviors both criminal and non-criminal.
So we think we may be able to leverage some public attention with this notion of, What does it mean to
be suspending kindergarteners? Obviously, we’re starting
with younger kids where people are more sympathetic.

Forum: Connecticut and other states are taking steps toward creating coordinated youth policies; the legislation just passed in Connecticut is one step. Where did the energy
come from in your state?

JG: That the legislation passed is really important. That
the council has the authority and responsibility to report
back on some type of commitment is exciting. And, that
we are beginning to develop the fiscal infrastructure and
the accountability infrastructure is good. I think it has
tremendous potential. I don’t think it’s the only mechanism
we need, but I do think it will turn out to be something
important.

The prevention council (established by the new legislation) has to become almost an alliance or a network rather than just a council of state agencies. If they can help us understand the public education messages around young people, then that will help us immensely. There are many other connections and initiatives that need to be attached to that for it to really move forward. The trick is how to make it real and how to have it align with entities that are not represented on it.

Forum: Connecticut just passed legislation creating a prevention council. How will this help?

JG: Connecticut has had a couple of initiatives that are
worth talking about, but I don’t think we have the public
commitment yet to build a strategic plan for young people.
We have pieces and we may be able to move part of
this through our prevention legislation, but we may need
a companion piece that looks at youth.

Forum: Are there other catalysts for this work?

JG: The WIA [Workforce Investment Act of 1998] brings
huge energy to this on the youth side. The new act says
we have to look at positive youth development so we
have to be clear about outcomes. We are using that mandate
to begin to build what I hope to be a statewide youth
policy board or a youth advocacy board that is statewide
across all populations, public and private. We have a new
youth listserv that we’re building as a means of sharing
information about program strategies, holes, gaps and
costs. We’re building a Web site that all agencies can contribute to in terms of youth. We don’t have that in
Connecticut. Those things are important in the sense that
they are building audiences and providing information.

What has the potential for a coming together comes
from a group of sub-areas where people are discovering
that the young people they’re worried about are the same
young folks that other people are worried about. Because
of the new understandings about positive youth development
and how systems can leverage the resources of each
other, they are discovering that from a systems perspective
as well as from a kid perspective it’s important to be
finding a point of common work.

The first point of focus is young people at the intersection of mental health and juvenile justice needs. On the other side, we have WIA with a statewide youth council for whom this same population — kids in the system, kids who have mental health needs, kids who are behind in education — is a priority. We’ve begun to try and figure out how we bring those efforts together with the mental health people looking in on a piece of it. One of the things that we see is that the folks on the employability side don’t really talk much to people on the mental health side or the juvenile justice side and they really need to do more of it.

Forum: You mentioned WIA as one source of energy and
resources. Are there other federal or local streams that
are being tapped to begin serving youth?

JG: We’re at stage one of the issue of leveraging. What
we have done is sort out where we spend our money. Our
task for this year will be to say, What do we need, what
more do we need, for what kinds of programs, and where
can we find it? I don’t feel like we’ve cracked TANF
[Temporary Assistance to Needy Families] at all, but we
can’t even have the conversation until we know where we
would want some of that money to be spent and we can
say, Look, we’ve got best practices here. There is great
interest in all sorts of wrap-around service models, such
as some of the model programs, that have been highlighted
on PEPNet [Promising and Effective Practice Network] and other places.

I think we need to have a little win here. We need to find one or two areas where we can actually have some systems impact to help people really understand that there is real benefit in these kinds of systems coordination endeavors.

Forum: In Vermont they are using indicators as a driving force. Is that on the table in Connecticut?

JG: We are using community indicators as a way of providing technical assistance and engage communities.
There is not a statewide focus that says we should use
indicators, but a lot of private support — United Way, our community foundations and some private family foundations — have committed to helping communities get the tools they need to do community benchmarking. We’ve
done it with seven or eight communities and will be doing
it with 50 more shortly. So, yes, we’re using indicators,
but not in the way that Vermont has done it, we reference
them all the time about best practices. We will have done
very good work at the community level but it’s a lot
slower process than top down.

Forum: From the federal level, the Younger Americans Act and changes in 21st Century Community Learning Centers
resources are fostering lots of discussion at the state
level. What is the response in Connecticut?

JG: In their individual pockets they make a lot of difference, the challenge is to figure out how a state creates a cross agency, public/private, state/community alliance of common interest and commitment to a strategic plan for young people and young people at risk. I think each of those pieces can help a little bit, but the real challenge is the cross-systems work. They each push pieces of it but none of them are sufficient by themselves. I’m not sure that federal legislation can demand that, that’s something that a state has to be committed to do. That’s a place where the prevention legislation will help us. But, what I’m hoping we’ll do is create that statewide youth advisory group that includes youth.

Forum: So, what are the lessons learned so far in Connecticut?

JG: I don’t think we’re as far out front on this issue as we need to be. I don’t feel we’re at the crest of the wave in terms of a youth development approach to services and supports for young people in the state of Connecticut. We have creatively used some opportunities to move those
issues, WIA and our use of technology, but I think
Connecticut has a lot more to learn from other people
than to teach them. We have a lot of work to do.

Janice Gruendel on Reframing Public Views of Youth

connect

get weekly updates

Spark Tweets

Secondary menu

Janice Gruendel on Reframing Public Views of Youth

connect

get weekly updates

related articles & media

Spark Tweets

Secondary menu