[staff] Empowering Youth Now: Incarcerated Social Entrepreneurs and the Dream it. Do It. Program
The Dream. It Do It. Initiative came to an end last Friday, after 18 months of exploration into the ways in which virtual worlds could be used in supporting young people around social entrepreneurship. The program was very much a process as we continued to adapt and shift the Initiative to better reach different populations of youth. The consistency remained in the core Dream it. Do it. model, as we sought to support young people with a intensive workshop series and up to $1000 USD for youth to identify issues they cared about and ultimately develop projects that would create change around them.
For me, the highlight of the 18 months was our partnership with the dedicated individuals at a jail serving juveniles in the U.S. Both the volunteer librarians and the young people exemplify what is possible through partnership and collaboration. In what I think was the most significant way to utilize new technology for social good, young people who were in great part physically discouraged from society were able to access resources, interact and learn from one another, and ultimately gain agency while incarcerated.
The level of participation and enthusiasm of these young people in many ways exceeded that of the other hundreds of young people we have been working with in school sites and after school programs. More importantly, was their ability to question great phenomena around them and take on complex issues in their community. These young men who called themselves the Icebergs (because they are so cool) acknowledged the deepest roots of issues in their community, identifying social inequity, the relationship between opportunity and class, and identified not only the drugs in their town, but the drug dealer as being problematic for the world they were seeking to change.
The group was incredibly talented and delegated roles in the group based on their talents and skills. Their vigor came through in their poetry and music, as they disentangled complex ideas in very precise ways. It became clear in our weekly meetings that they understood that all youth could be active, engaged, citizens now. They were in many ways more conscious and appreciative of the idea of citizenry and contribution than most of the young people that had participated in the program. In many ways these outstanding young men challenged the notion that incarcerated people had to be less participatory or have their empowerment put on hold until they were released. In a country that remains too far away from the type of restorative justice it needs, this program signified an opening in jail walls. On our Wednesday mornings our Icebergs could just be themselves and take meaningful steps towards the kind of world that they wanted to be a part of again some day.
