Tapping the Potential of Non-Traditional Leaders

I haven’t always been a big fan of conventional youth leadership programs. They seem to be places where young go-getters go to network with important people and learn new ideas about becoming better go-getters. What’s the point?

How about a program for kids who aren’t actively seeking leadership positions or looking for ways to maximize the potential they have already exhibited and been recognized for time and time again?

Do I sound bitter? Was I passed over for leadership accolades when I was a youth? Looking back on it, I can’t recall any inspirational mentors who recognized my innate potential, lurking somewhere beneath an off-putting veneer of smart-alecky cluelessness. On the other hand, I can’t say that I was much interested in being recognized either.

So naturally, I’m drawn to the idea of communities trying to develop the less obvious potential leaders who may have been passed over by the usual leadership development entities, and that’s what Salisbury, Maryland, had in mind when it developed its Youth Leadership Academy to focus on engaging non-traditional youthful leaders, those with untapped leadership potential and limited opportunities.

A little background: Salisbury was named one of the “100 Best Communities for Young People” by the group America’s Promise in 2006 and awarded $20,000. The local chapter of the organization met to figure out how to use the money and the planning group unanimously agreed to create an academy focused on developing the community’s “non-traditional leaders,” that is, the kids with untapped leadership potential and limited opportunities.

The Salisbury program is available to any young person between 8th grade and junior year in high school at no cost. It reaches out to local secondary schools and youth organizations. But word of mouth is the most effective recruitment method, the organizers of the academy have found.

The academy works like this: students come together for three days in the summer at Salisbury University to learn new skills and ideas about leadership. From those participants, a Youth Action Team (YAT) is created to plan the next summer’s academy. Any interested graduate of the Academy is accepted for YAT.

YLA graduates have made an impression. Two students won positions in the Student Government Association their freshmen year. Another became senior class president. Other students have served on boards of organizations and attended a Search Institute Conference. One graduate was the Student Representative to the Maryland State Board of Education.

That graduate was also a 2010 Olympic torchbearer for Coca-Cola. Another graduate was accepted into the CIVICUS program at University of Maryland-College Park. Several graduates received scholarships to attend colleges such as Davidson, Morgan State University, Princeton, and Shaw University. Others received the President’s Service Award.

Hundreds of young people have participated since YLA was founded in 2006 and the program has never turned anyone away. One graduate explained that YLA “has brought the youth voice to the table—youth are included in planning groups as an expectation not an exception now.”

Salisbury was an All-America City in 2010 and YLA was one of the programs they touted when they appeared before the civic jury. Salisbury’s was one of several innovative youth-led programs described at the 2010 All-America City Awards. In Chandler, Arizona, a group of young people developed a comprehensive community program to discourage underage drinking and substance abuse. High school students in Middleton, Wisconsin, a finalist in 2009, participated in a planning “charrette” to design a new splash park.

Communities all over the country, in fact, have recognized the importance of engaging young people in leadership development and local problem-solving/decision-making efforts, and it’s beginning to show in terms of the larger numbers of young people who are included in the community delegations at the annual All-America City competition/celebration.

It’s an old cliché to say that young people represent the future of the country. These days the new cliché is that “young people aren’t the future, they’re the present.”

What new youth movements are on the horizon in your community? Are there any youth programs in your town that you think are deserving of accolades? We are always looking to assist in touting amazing stories such as these, so please drop us a line and let us know.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Back in 2009, IBM announced it was opening a technology center in Dubuque, Iowa, a move that would bring 1,300 jobs to the region. Not long afterwards, I read an editorial by a TV commentator in Madison, Wisconsin: “IBM could have located here, and chose Dubuque. That’s just not right.”

Source: Dirk Hansen

What seemed remarkable to the author the opinion piece was the notion that a small, Iowa city would be selected instead of a more recognized technology “triangle” or “corridor,” but it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Dubuque was an all-America city winner in 2007 and I knew that it was an unusually innovative community. What it lacked in glitz and cachet, it more than compensated for with pluck, organization and civic spirit.

To be selected a finalist for All-America City Awards each community must submit an application that tells its story and describes three community-improvement projects and Dubuque had quite a dramatic story. In 1985, it had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, upward of 23 percent. The city’s largest employer, John Deere, recently had shut its doors, and residents were leaving in droves. Old-timers remember when a joker put up a billboard outside town that said: “Will the last person to leave Dubuque please turn out the lights?”

A few years later, the city undertook an ambitious public planning process called Vision 2000, in which citizens from across the region met to lay out a road map for economic recovery: The vision that emerged was a “diverse and balanced economic base that provides job security for all segments of the community … secured through the support, retention, recruitment of retail, manufacturing, hi-tech, services, year-round tourism, recycling businesses and industries.”

Source: Gregory Davis

Focusing on bringing in new industry – insurance, technology, publishing, health care, education and tourism – Dubuque rose to No. 1 among Iowa’s metro centers for job growth. A revitalized waterfront with hiking trails, restaurants, a museum and an aquarium reconnected the city with one of its great resources, the Mississippi River.

Vision 2000 was the first of four strategic planning processes that took place in Dubuque over about a dozen years, the latest being Envision 2010 in 2005, when thousands of residents convened to dream up 10 “big” ideas for the future.

One of those ideas was for downtown Dubuque to be a “cool” place to live, where people surf the Internet and chat in cafes with original art hanging on exposed brick walls, a place that would draw young professionals away from Chicago and the Twin Cities because of its combination of livability, affordability and opportunity.

“It all started in the 1980s when people decided we had reached the bottom and collectively wanted to make it a better community,” said Mayor Roy Buol. “The new Dubuque, that’s what I call it. People really bought into the idea. There was a common desire to better the community and make it place where everybody has opportunities, a place people want to come, and when they do come, to stay.”

Last year, when we were doing a special issue of the National Civic Review on environmental sustainability, Dubuque’s name came up again—as a case study in community-wide successful environmental sustainability planning. Again I wasn’t surprised.

Few, if any, winners of the All-America City Award have exemplified the spirit of regional cooperation, civic engagement and community innovation more effectively than Dubuque. It’s a story that we love to tell and tell again.

To learn more about the National Civic League, click here, or to nominate your city for an All-American City award, visit here.

Is there a similar story of rebirth and rejuvenation for your town that you would like to share? Please do let us know, we would love to hear about it.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Sacramento Focuses on Grade-Level Reading

I see that State of the ReUnion has been doing some reporting on Sacramento, California, exploring some of the tough challenges facing the community, so I thought I’d mention that Sacramento is joining the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a national effort to get more low income kids to read at grade level by third grade.

Last month, Mayor Kevin Johnson launched the Sacramento Reads! 3rd Grade Literacy Campaign, one of the largest communitywide reading initiatives in the United States. Currently only about 37 percent of third graders in Sacramento read at grade level. The goal of Sacramento Reads! is for 80 percent of third graders to be reading at grade level by 2020.

Sacramento’s ambitious plan is part of a collaborative effort by dozens of funders and nonprofit partners across the nation known as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Other communities that have answered the call include New Britain, Connecticut; Springfield, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California.

The campaign focuses on three preventable causes of the performance gap between low income readers and other students:
•    The readiness gap: The fact that many low income kids who show up for school are already behind because they haven’t had as much access to books or high quality pre-kindergarten programs that help prepare students to learn.
•    The attendance gap: I’ve already written a blog post about this problem. Research has found that one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students nationwide misses nearly a month of school each year in excused and unexcused absences.
•    The summer slide (summer learning loss): Lots of students lose ground over the summer if they are not reading at home or engaged in enrichment programs.

The National Civic League has also joined this nationwide effort. Our part will be to encourage communities to address the reading gap by focusing the 2012 and 2015 All-America City Awards on grade level reading efforts. Ordinarily, the award programs let communities choose the issue areas they want to present to our jury of civic experts at the annual event. In 2012, we’ll be doing things a little differently.

In 2012, the All-America City Award program will be a little different. NCL is asking communities to develop comprehensive plans that focus on the three critical areas identified by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Winners must demonstrate capacity to use data, deploy effective interventions, build strong cross‐sector partnerships, and mobilize public will to improve reading proficiency in the early grades.

Since the late 1990s, NCL has asked All-America City finalist communities to list at least one project that benefitted or engaged young people. Consequently, we’ve had more than a few past winners present reading or literacy projects.

For example: Marietta, Georgia, a winner in 2006, touted “Marietta Reads!” program. Participants selected books from approved lists and are tested on reading comprehension. Students earned points on the basis of the book’s difficulty and test scores. Goals were set for students at each grade level in all the city’s schools, and students earned awards by reaching those goals.

Hollywood, Florida, a winner in 2007, presented its “Born to Read” program, which positioned a fulltime librarian at the Memorial Primary Care Clinic, to interact with each family of young children. New families were given an application for a library card, a resource guide and a first book for the child. Families were given instructions on ways to encourage reading and this is reinforced with every subsequent visit to the clinic.

El Paso, Texas, a winner in 2010 has its annual Día de los Niños/ Día de Los Libros to improve literacy and health awareness in the community. The event involves a free giveaway of books and opportunities for young people to sign up for the Summer Reading Club.

Tupelo, Mississippi, a winner last year, featured two projects from the mayor’s task force on education:  “Read Tupelo” which provides a morning of learning for approximately 400 four and five year olds, including art activities, a music demonstration with various instruments, and story time presented by local officials and volunteers. Another initiative provides every baby born at North Mississippi Medical Center’s Women’s Hospital a copy of the book, Goodnight Moon.

Our hope is that more and more communities will do what Sacramento is doing and organize community-based efforts to address the reading gap. (Another difference in 2012 is that the campaign and its partners are offering technical assistance and peer learning opportunities to cities that participate in the award process.) To qualify, communities must submit a letter of intent by October 14.

For more information on the All-America City Grade Level Reading Award, visit the campaign’s website or the All-America City Award blog.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Like most people I’ve always thought of truancy or chronic absenteeism as a high school phenomenon, but according to experts the problem can affect student performance at an earlier age. In some school districts, in fact, the absentee rate in kindergarten is almost as high as it is for ninth graders. The National Center for Childhood Poverty says that one in 10 kindergarten and first-grade students is chronically absent, although the absentee rates very significantly from district to district.

Source: Manning

Kids miss school for different reasons, but one thing is clear; too many missed school days, whether excused or unexcused, can have a huge impact on student performance, especially among low income kids.

In an article I’m preparing for the National Civic Review, authors Hedy N. Chang and Phyllis W. Jordan describe what three school districts—Baltimore, New York and Oakland, California—are doing to address chronic absenteeism. In Baltimore, for example, the mayor’s office, the Open Society Institute-Baltimore and the local school district teamed up to make attendance a top community priority, enlisting a number of local organizations in a community-wide effort to bring down rates of absenteeism. Students made videos on the importance of attendance. Church members contact the families of chronically absent children to find out what the problem is. OSI-Baltimore grants focused on homeless kids and foster-children, two groups of kids that typically have high rates of absenteeism.

Baltimore’s Franklin Square Elementary and Middle School used a carrot and stick approach to create a “culture of attendance.” The principal meets with the family of every new student and emphasizes the important of attendance. The school attendance monitor calls the home of every absent student. After three days the family gets a letter. If the problem persists, the principal calls the home.

But the staff also tries to make the school environment a place where kids want to be with engaging after school programs and extras like dental clinics and haircuts for students who want or need them. Despite a mostly low income student population and pretty crowded classrooms, Franklin has one of the highest attendance rates in the district.

It seems pretty clear that focusing laser-like on a problem like absenteeism can make a big difference. But according to the authors, not everyone is looking at the right data. “Many school districts are in the dark because they don’t look at the right numbers. They look at average, school-wide attendance data, and they look at truancy, not the full range of excused and unexcused absences. Thus, they don’t know how many students are missing 10 percent of the school year, or in other words, how many students are chronically absent. Even a school with 95 percent average daily attendance can have 15 to 20 percent of its students registering high levels of absenteeism.”

Apparently Baltimore was uniquely positioned to focus on this issue in part because the state of Maryland was keeping the right kind of statistics, looking at the number of students who were chronically absent. Also, researchers at Johns Hopkins were doing work in the area of chronic absenteeism.

“Chronic absence is a problem we can fix,” note the authors, “if we look at the right data and start early enough. Schools and communities are seeing attendance rates improve within months when they  monitor chronic absence data, identify barriers to attendance, and reach out to children and families help them overcome barriers to getting to school. People everywhere understand the value of school attendance, which makes it easy for city leaders to rally support for their campaigns.”

The 2012 All-America City Awards will recognize communities that have developed the most comprehensive, realistic and sustainable plans to increase grade-level reading proficiency by the end of third grade by focusing on three areas that have real potential to drive improvements in grade-level reading: school readiness, school attendance, and summer learning. To sign a letter of intent for your community to apply for the award, link here.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

In 1947 burglars broke into the Jackson County, Missouri Courthouse, blasted open a vault with nitroglycerine and made off with local election records. The crime was never solved, but everyone knew the purpose: to prevent the government from investigating allegations of widespread fraud in the 1946 Democratic Party primary.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, but the unsolved break-in (shades of Watergate) marked the dying gasp of a notoriously corrupt regime, a machine that had dominated Kansas City, Missouri, for decades. After that and some other outrages, a citizen committee formed to prevent the remnants of the machine from regaining a foothold in local affairs.

Kansas City won its first All-America City Award in 1950 for “forming a citizens committee to keep the rascals out.” They’ve won the award four more times since, making them one of a select group of five-time AAC winners.

Over the years, the focus of AAC, or rather the projects listed by the communities, has evolved along with mission of the National Civic League and the nature of the challenges facing American communities. During the 1950s, a central theme was fighting corruption and professionalizing city government. In the 1960s and 1970s there was more on race relations and redeveloping deteriorating urban areas. In the 1980s, the focus shifted to crime and youth gangs, the loss of manufacturing jobs and dealing with the consequences of rapid growth, and so on.

The idea of the award is that by recognizing and publicizing outstanding examples of civic accomplishment we could influence other communities to undertake similar efforts. We’re pretty proud of the way the program has worked in the past, but in recent years, we’ve begun to think about how we could use the award more strategically, not just to recognize things that have already happened, but to try to get communities to focus on particular challenges going forward.

In small ways, we’ve been doing this for years. A recent example: in 2010, Scott County, Kansas, was selected as a finalist for the award competition. The community sent a delegation of local worthies to plead their case in front of a jury of civic experts. The delegation came very close to winning, but fell short, partly because, as one of the jurors put it—where’s the diversity?

Like many other areas of the country, western Kansas had experienced rapid growth in its Latino population as more and more immigrants moved to join the local work force. But this growing diversity was not very well-reflected in their application or in the composition of their delegation.  “We took that to heart,” notes Katie Eisenhour, executive director of the Scott City Chamber of Commerce. “NCL called us on it. That’s when we really looked at our community and had the courage to have these conversations about our Hispanic community.”

That year, Southwest Airlines offered to pay for any finalist community that wanted to avail itself of NCL’s Community Success program, which helps convene community-based dialogues and civic engagement process. Scott City held its first Diversity/Multicultural Roundtable in November 2010. A Diversity Steering Committee has been meeting on a monthly basis. (Read more about the effort here.)

The committee has been hosting local events to bring together Latinos, Mennonites and other groups within the community. They developed a list of priorities, including after hours English-as-a second language classes, a resource center for newcomers, hiring bilingual employees in local businesses, encouraging a more diverse representation in local government and holding an annual multi-cultural event that would hopefully become a community tradition.

In 2011 they came back to the All-America City Award (this time as Scott City), making diversity and cultural understanding a central part of their presentation. The jurors were impressed enough to make them one of the ten winners selected last June, fittingly enough, in Kansas City.

We do this award for a reason. Sure, it’s a great event and its gives people a chance to network, exchange ideas and receive the recognition they deserve, but we also want to have a tangible influence on what’s going on in communities, which is one reason we decided to focus the 2012 award program one critical issue, K-3 reading proficiency and see if in partnership with a national coalition we could help move the dime on a critical issue.

It’s an experiment, and next year we will find out how well it works. In the meantime, you can read more about the 2012 AAC Grade Level Reading Award by linking here.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.