How to Start a Youth Development Program

In April 1999, I was honored with being chosen by a local non-profit agency to become a youth development specialist. I was chosen because of my social work and teaching experience with young people. Each of the surrounding three counties in the Jacksonville, Florida, area were also initiating the program at the same time. We merely were told it was a youth development program and were told what our budget was for the year. That was it. The rest was up to each youth development specialist creativity to figure out how their program would run.

For the first few months, I noticed that my fellow co workers in the surrounding counties merely took the youth on field trips as a means to spend the money. I would hold a monthly meeting on some important topic and very few children would show up. However, if i was to pay for a trip to see the Jaguar football game, everyone showed up. So thus my idea began. Why not make the youth work for their trips? Why not come up with some requirements for the youth in order to earn the wonderful free trips we were offering.

The first thing I did was decide on a monthly educational topic. The first month I chose drug prevention and connected with the local sheriff office who provided not only a sheriff to talk about drug prevention, but brought along a convict that was in prison for selling drugs. He was more than willing to share with the youth what drug addiction and selling drugs would do to a person's life.

My next step was to think of some community service project that the youth had to perform in order to earn their free trip. Our first project was to connect with the local project to clean Florida's rivers. We were given a section of the local St. Mary's river to clean up. We were to turn in our bags full of garbage and in return, we were rewarded with a wonderful dinner at the local Kingsly Plantation.