Youthlearn News Archive 2006

CITIZENShift is a website that features film, photos, text and audio all with a focus on social issues and activism. Check out the CITIZENShift's latest feature, Youth Empowerment Through Media. This dossier features media by youth exploring issues that are important to them.

YouthNoise, a Web site initially launched in 2001, re-launched last month with the aim of encouraging youth dialogue on important social issues. The revised site, featuring content created exclusively by young people, lets users submit articles they’ve written, post to message boards on various topics, and participate in debates. Site users (who range in age from 16 to 22) discuss issues relating to politics, health, education, and more.

Youth Service America and the U.S.

Showing kids how to see with the camera's eye comes more easily with this activity from the YouthLearn collection.
Photography is not just about pointing and pressing a button; it's a decision-making process. One of the best reasons for working photography into your activities and projects is that it helps kids better understand the media images they're bombarded with every day.

Photography is also just plain fun, and it's a wonderful foundation for community-based projects.

Have your picture featured in this year's State of the World's Children

Submissions due 8 September 2006

This year's State of the World's Children will argue that one of the most powerful constraints to fulfilling children's rights and achieving the Millennium Development Goals is the discrimination experienced by women.

'TeachEngineering' provides more than 500 lessons and activities for teaching engineering content in K-12 science and math classes. Topics include oil and energy consumption, water and electricity, mass and volume, various energy sources, heat transfer, solar heating systems, collisions and momentum, electrons, cellular respiration, biomedical engineering, and more. Lessons connect real-world experiences with concepts and skills already taught in K-12 classrooms.

Most children and adolescents want to be good, but they find it very difficult. There are many competing pressures on them, and they often feel that they must choose between loyalty to friends and 'doing what is right,' as dictated by parents and teachers. Children need opportunities to talk with sympathetic adults who can help them to understand that they are not alone in their ethical confusion and that they are not the only ones who sometimes fall short of their own ethical ideal.

This 'Youth as E-Citizens' Online Tour is the digital piece of a much larger research project."
The online tour includes these categories: Voting; Volunteering; Philanthropy; Local Community; Global Issues; Media; Access; Tolerance; Youth Development; and Activism.

"The project report -- 'Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation' -- is available as a searchable PDF file.

'Youth as E-Citizens' provides a groundbreaking overview of Web-based civic efforts, by and for youth.

Pay It Forward Mini-Grants are designed to fund one-time-only service-oriented projects identified by youth as activities they would like to perform to benefit their school, neighborhood, or greater community. Projects must contain a 'pay it forward' focus – that is, they must be based on the concept of one person doing a favor for others, who in turn do favors for others, with the results growing exponentially – to be considered in the grant making process.

On July 18, the Kaiser Family Foundation hosted a forum, "Paths to Success for Young African-American Men," which featured experts (and actor Bill Cosby) discussing findings from a major new survey by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University. A recap, a webcast of the event, and the related materials are available online.