Welcome to the Youth Empowerment System (YES).
A Resource Support To Project Impact South Bend.
The process will “lay claim” to technology as a “tool” of training, planning and transformation. Participants will be exposed to and gain expertise in using the latest technology applications in team building, training, instruction, knowledge development and systemic and systematic planning to meet community goals and objectives. These cadres of trained leaders will go back to their schools, community organizations, service agencies, government units, public housing developments, youth organizations, etc. with detailed plans of action. They will band with others to produce a critical mass of leadership trained and committed to collaborative action for the common good.
Transformation
This is a process that can influence the effectiveness of many programs. It is aimed at helping to organize and train community and professional leadership so that their collective force can facilitate transformational differences in the lives of individuals, families, organizations and neighborhoods, small and large. The process shall not be organized for minimal success, with a few people doing well while many remain unfulfilled, unproductive and unrewarded. The key goal is to facilitate substantive improvement in the lives of the majority of the people it serves. Transformation is the major goal. People have enormous potential for living positive, contributing lives or negative ones. Which way they turn will depend upon the choices they make and the chances they take
“Culture” and “Habits”
The choices that people make and the chances they take depend, to a large measure, upon their influencing environments or “habit base”. If they are enmeshed in dominant environments of negativity, welfare dependency, despair, substance abuse, crime, non-learning and defeatism, they will more than likely make corresponding choices of attitudes, behaviors and life styles. Negative environments stunt the growth of even the most positive of individuals. At best, these environments lead most people to select lives that waste the enormous reservoir of human potential. At worst, these influencing environments predispose individuals to chose life paths filled with horrible consequences, for the individuals, their families and society in general.
Therefore, transforming community require “cultures of transformation” as cultures impacts upon the choices that people make. In the final analysis, the individuals must choose his/her life’s path. People cannot be empowered. They must choose to become empowered. People cannot be taught if they do not wish to be educated. They must choose to become effective and avid learners, productive workers and responsible citizens. Daily, people are faced with endless choices – do I get up eager to get to work? --- do I seize the day or waste it? The dominant cultures in the lives of citizens help to determine the choices that they make.
If some neighborhoods are too heavily influenced by negative cultures, then positive cultures/environments must be “intentionally created.” Creating environments where positive cultures replace negative ones is not easily accomplished. Individuals, acting in isolation of others cannot accomplish this feat. Many people must come together to create the critical mass necessary to establish the positive cultures. This will not happen without visionary and trained leadership. For the best results, trained leaders must form into teams of transformational leaders.
Institutions and Systems
Transforming communities depend, to a large measure, on our societal mega-systems, institutions and agencies. The mega-systems (education, employment, health, welfare, government, economic, business and industry, faith-based, neighborhood-based) must provide the overall direction to the collaborative and transforming efforts. Neighborhood service agencies and institutions must develop site-specific plans of action and initiate coordinated approaches to community transformation. Individuals, even acting in teams, have an almost impossible task in attempting to transform communities. For most effective results, individuals, or teams of individuals must act in partnership with or as part of a community-wide institutional/systemic approach to community improvement. People acting as members of teams of leaders within institutions and agencies have the greatest chance of creating the dominant positive cultures necessary to influence positive choices on the part of individuals and families.
A critical principle is that institutions must lead the transformational processes. To transform neighborhoods, institutions must act together as a multi-unit whole. Disorganized communities will founder. At-risk neighborhoods must have trained leadership teams to advance. Government, human service institutions and institutions of higher education must take the responsibility of leading these community organizational efforts. The proposed processes will be in the forefront in this development.
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