On Please Speak Freely, Eric Gurna, Founder of Development Without Limits interviews leading thinkers, artists and others to shed light on key issues and explore different perspectives about youth development and education. The idea is to get past the platitudes and institutional positions, and have honest, nuanced conversations about things that really matter to young people and communities. Please Speak Freely guests include:
• Raffi, Children’s Troubadour and Founder of the Centre for Child Honouring
• Alfie Kohn, Author of several books including Punished By Rewards and The Schools Our Children Deserve
• Dr. Pedro Noguera, Professor of Education at New York University
• Karen Pittman, President & CEO of the Forum for Youth Investment
• Tony Smith, Former Superintendent of the Oakland Unified School District
• Lenore Skenazy, “America’s Worst Mom” and Author of Free-Range Kids
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Hanaa Arafat spearheaded an appeal effort that had a big statewide impact in New York, by gently but rigorously insisting that the State maintain standards of fairness in how they dole out grants for afterschool programs
“The self-reporting mechanism to document poverty [is] discriminatory, because teenagers do not want to self-report on this.”
– Hanaa Arafat
By Kiran Gaudioso, Vice President of Program Operations forI thoroughly enjoyed listening to the conversation between Hannah and Eric. They discussed an extremely important aspect of grant writing and data collection. As those of us in the youth development and education sector know, the use of the free and reduced lunch data is an accepted measure to prove “need” within a particular school community. However for high schools, as Hannah explained, it isn’t necessarily the best way to measure community and school “need,” for two reasons: 1) it requires families to self report their status. High school students don’t want to be viewed as poor or in need, so high school students have a tendency to not submit a request for free and reduced lunch benefits. 2) NYC High Schools tend to draw students from all over the five boroughs, requiring students to commute up to two hours each way. These transportation logistics make it even harder to collect parent information, such as free and reduced lunch needs, because the parents are rarely in the school building.
By Deepmalya Ghosh, LCSW-R; Director of Youth Development Programs, The Child Center of NY
Brad Lupien is an idealist and an entrepreneur in the field of youth development. In his world, every young person would have an Individualized-Education Plan (better known as an IEP). He thinks that we need to find cost effective ways to deliver services with dollars invested, whether from the public or private sector. With the zeal of Robin Hood, he believes that there can be a symbiosis between the non-profit and the for-profit world and challenges executives to see this. I found the dialogue on this episode of Please Speak Freely to be passionate, inspiring and a good reminder of how important it is to think, “out of the box.”
Brad Lupien, Co-Founder and Co-President of ARC (formerly Champions) has a million ideas for how to improve education and the lives of young people, and in this episode we got to discuss a few.
“You’ve got to try lots and lots of different things and think about lots of crazy ideas and you have to be comfortable that most of them will fail. But if one of them is a great idea and it sticks, you’re successful.”
– Brad Lupien
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“I’m very worried that the move towards the business is best approach, right throughout society, is eroding older traditions of solidarity and working together, and cooperation and community in the public spirit, which are the things we are going to need to get us out of the mess that we’re in.” – Michael Edwards
I can’t remember how I first came across Michael Edwards’ book, Small Change, Why Business Won’t Save the World, but it was a rarely engrossing experience for me. I love to read, but I often skim the non-fiction stuff, and I was surprised to find myself highlighting passages, dog-earing pages and reading lines aloud to whoever happened to be nearby. I even bought a stack of them and started giving them away – to me the book is somewhat of a manifesto, and I wanted others to share my fascination. Small Change is a thin paperback that packs a punch – it’s a critique of the current culture and system of philanthropy, and more than that it’s a sharp analysis of where we are as a culture in general.
Most of us don’t stop to celebrate our work often enough. I think it is especially true for those in afterschool, where new and seemingly intractable challenges crop up daily, and certainly in advocacy, when success can be hard to measure and troubling policy proposals threaten the progress we’ve made to date.
Thanks to PASE and its awards, we have a moment to stop and reflect on the amazing work that makes our field so special. These awards shine a light on individuals who are literally transforming lives.
PASEsetters Deena Hellman, Mi Jung You, Faybiene Miranda, Patrick Pinchinat and Sadie Mahoney don’t let any challenge thwart their efforts to support youth. From starting new projects like a Guys and Girls discussion group, to engaging external resources to help a struggling student succeed, to securing a mental health counseling license, they are constantly finding ways to better serve their communities. They are resourceful, dogged, inspired.
By Jakada Imani, Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human RightsIt would be silly (and destructive) to attempt to run a business as though it was a kindergarten. With naptime, finger paintings, and slowly taking time to teach people to do the simplest things no matter how much repetition is involved, kindergarten-minded businesses would likely fail in the first year. Even if our model were a world-class kindergarten, it would be a bad idea. The fundamental missions of early childhood education and business are distinct. The main goal of business is to maximize profits. The main goal of kindergarten is to teach children social development; there are very few lessons that you could ever really apply from a well-run playschool to business. But we are more and more confronted with the inverse proposition – that education and human service organizations should run like businesses.
When I first heard this concept, I thought it referred to efficiencies and effectiveness. But I have come to understand this as an attack on the public and social sectors, an attack on public investment in and for public good. The notion that everything can be done efficiently and for a profit is almost everywhere. Recently I wrote a piece for HuffPost about the profit motive in private prisons. We can learn a lot from great, well run companies. I have been deeply inspired by entrepreneurs. But business does not have a lock on excellence. In fact many for-profits are poorly run and most fail. And fail miserably. For every Facebook there are a thousand Friendsters. And that’s fine for widgets, or social network sites. But not for the education of our children, not for economic development of our community and not for the future of our country. For these endeavors we need to focus as much or more on long-term outcomes and the health of the human family as we do on the cost per unit.