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by: Jason Wyman I am on the plane back from Indiana listening to Damien Rice and reflecting on my experiences over the last week, specifically over the last 36 hours. It has been a whirlwind of activity: Youth Worker Brown Bags, Financial Literacy 101 for Youth Workers presented by Y-TEP, Community Conversations, We Are Youth Workers Steering Committee meeting, and the fantastic time spent with The Navigators, a group of youth worker fellows in Indiana. Tomorrow I spend the day with Steering Committee members doing arts-based practice to help think really big about the YDPN, and I am on the verge of tears. I am amazed by youth workers. I am amazed by their resiliency, candor, passion, critical thought and lives. I am overwhelmed by how much they do given everything that surrounds them and all of the roadblocks, both internally and externally, that lay on their path.
 My time with The Navigators came at exactly the right moment. The YDPN has been reflecting, refining, and growing since our public launch in 2003. I have been fortunate to be a part of this process and help guide its development into a new ecological model of sustainability. Being a part of this process has been exhilarating. YDPN staff and members (ask me how you can become a member) understand and practice our values -- innovation, connectedness, and intentionality. Additionally, we share a common set of principles that guide our work. Those principles include faith, openness, and rejuvenation. These values and principles are the cornerstone for our ecology model, and are rooted in over six years of youth worker-led organizing.
I remember a story from The Starfish and the Spider (an excellent book about distributive power) about the birth of the internet. Dave Garrison, CEO of Netcom, went to Paris in 1995 to meet with a bunch of potential financiers about investing in Netcom, an early internet service provider (e.g. AOL, Earthlink, etc.). These financiers wanted to know who the president of the internet was. They wanted to hold one person responsible for its success or failures. They also were looking for one singular leader. Dave kept trying to tell these financiers that there was no one president of the internet, but the concept was just too bold for them. They refused to invest in something that bucked their concepts of what leadership, accountability, and power.
Similarly, I find myself constantly defending our new model of shared leadership, power, and accountability to decision-makers and investors. The ecological model of the YDPN is nothing new. It is grounded in social empowerment, youth development, and service-learning frameworks. These three frameworks are well understood individually. Collectively, they are harder to grasp because it means a fundamental change in the way work is approached.
Let's take the Youth Worker Brown Bags as an example. Our Brown Bag series is focused on networking for youth workers. Fundamentally, the YDPN believes we all have expertise and that expertise needs to be capitalized on. The Youth Worker Brown Bags create a space for that expertise to be explored and shared. Brown Bags are facilitated to engage youth workers in exploring questions related to their practice. No one person holds the solutions or answers. Through a process of reflection and refinement, youth workers connect to each other and diverse ideas. They then explore how to implement those ideas into their roles as youth workers. At the end of the Brown Bag, participants are asked to help support the effort by pitching in and typing notes, spreading the word, or attending the next Brown Bag. If no one signs up, there is no follow-up to that Brown Bag. We rely solely on participants to drive sustainability.
Another example is the Financial Literacy 101 for Youth Workers. Youth Trainers for Economic Power, a program of the Mission SF Community Financial Center, facilitated this training. It was an amazing event where young adult (aged middle school to high school) youth workers educated adult (mostly late twenties and up) on economic power. This event was not just about educating youth workers about financial literacy. It was also about flipping the power dynamic from one where youth are recipients of services to providers of services for adults. The event was a huge success and provided both groups, Y-TEP and the participants, a way to learn and grow.
These two examples show a very different approach to youth worker personal and professional development as well as a new way of thinking about our community. Both take power and redistribute how it is implemented and perceived. Brown Bags take power and accountability and place it in the hands of participants in order for them to develop their expertise and leadership. The Financial Literacy 101 class placed power in the hands of young adult youth workers and flipped the relationship between youth and adults. Both models show a new way for us to accomplish our work. Both models share success and failure. Both models are built on faith that redistributing power will yield more innovative, connected, and intentional solutions to opportunities and challenges facing youth workers.
 I was invited to Indiana to meet The Navigators, a group of youth workers engaged in a fellowship funded by the Lilly Endowment. Their purpose is to identify projects they want to work on to professionalize the youth work field. They grew out of The Journey Fellowship, also funded by Lilly Endowment, whose aim is to support youth workers in their personal self-care and rejuvenation. The Journey has been in existence for seven years. This is the first year of The Navigators.
I was asked to share the YDPN Ecology as well as be a participant in their working session. Janet Wakefield, Director, had searched numerous programs and states for a similar worker-centered initiative, project, or organization. After numerous calls, she and I landed on the phone together. We were both impressed with finally having found something that was so similar in mission and aim. It was a first for both of us.
On one of our planning calls, I asked Janet exactly what she would like from me on this trip. She responded "We just want you to come and be fabulous." I will admit it: I have no problem being fabulous. I am, however, incredibly uncomfortable being viewed as an expert or leader. In fact, one of the main reasons I joined the YDPN was because, as demonstrated above, we view each other as peers, not as leaders or followers, and while we may have expertise, we make no claims at being experts. We are and always will be a work in progress. This trip was going to challenge my self perception. It was going to place me in a role of leader and expert for I was the guest of honor.
This amazing group of Navigators come from all sectors of youth work -- colleges and universities, funders, afterschool programs, YMCAs, intermediaries, youth ministry, and more. They care deeply about the youth of Indiana, and, more importantly to me, they care deeply for other youth workers and their value in society. They are working on two projects to increase that value. One is a credentialing process for youth workers based on an agreed upon set of core competencies. The second is recognition and celebration strategies (e.g. a state-wide youth worker day, collecting stories of youth workers, and an appreciation toolkit) so youth workers know and feel their value. These individuals are working on these projects above and beyond their regular jobs. In fact, they are just like YDPN Steering Committee members. And the YDPN Ecology can and will make a huge difference in the sustainability of their work. It brings a name and a framework to the distributive power the group is already practicing.
 Sitting here on the plane writing this reflection, I now realize that not viewing myself as a leader or an expert has placed roadblocks in front of me both internally and externally and that that has an impact on the perception of my work and life. This perception creeps it at in opportune times. It allows compromises to practices that I know will yield a new dawn of shared leadership. It produces self-doubt, and while a certain level of self-doubt promotes humility too much yields inaction and breeds submissiveness to a power structure that is dominated by hierarchy. It undermines my ability to speak about the transformative power of our Ecology. And most importantly, it limits my ability to see the resources available to me, the YDPN, and others I come in contact with.
Ultimately, Dave Garrison had to tell the French investors that he was the "president" of the internet in order to secure funding. He had to temporarily claim leadership in order to move forward. He knew full well the power of the internet to redistribute that leadership with or without his involvement, and his stepping in helped secure that future. My involvement in YDPN's ecological development has made me an expert in a new of of thinking about and approaching distributive power. It has also made me a role model of shared leadership. I need to be firm in these roots and identities for they will bring about the vision the YDPN is seeking: Many youth workers in many settings for many years.
Working with The Navigators and the YDPN has made me realize that we are on the verge of something truly revolutionary. We are approaching a point of singularity where we will emerge as valued professionals, and we will be looked to to advise other workers on how to share and distribute power. There is no turning back. And, while I am not the "president" of the YDPN, I am a catalyst for it, and I am incredibly honored to be among so many amazing leaders, experts, and peers who carry the same torch.
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