Stephen Hamilton
“Brain drain” and loss of the young adult population threaten rural areas in NYS and elsewhere, as does the decision of youth who remain to drop out or not to pursue post-secondary education. If rural youth are to contribute to the vitality of their communities, they must graduate from high school and then pursue post-secondary education and training. But young adults must feel sufficiently engaged with those communities to remain in or return to them and to be active citizens. Even if they choose to live elsewhere, participants will take valuable attitudes and skills with them. Youth who have natural mentors (i.e., not in a mentoring program) are more likely to enter higher education; however, youth from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to have mentors. Mentoring relationships develop naturally when youth and adults work together toward common goals.
A new initiative proposes to foster these natural mentoring relationships. The Community Mobilization for Mentoring Youth project received Hatch and Cornell Cooperative Extension annual funding for three years, starting October 1, 2008. Mary Agnes Hamilton, Family Life Development Center is PI; Co-PIs are Stephen Hamilton, Department of Human Development; Davydd Greenwood, Department of Anthropology; and Thomas Hirschl, Department of Development Sociology.
The Community Mobilization for Mentoring Youth project will encourage natural mentoring, and increase opportunities for more youth to contribute to their communities’ vitality and to reflect on and pursue their goals, especially via higher education or training. In turn, the project will increase the youth development capacity of adults and of community organizations, specifically by building opportunities for: supportive relationships, efficacy and mattering, and skill building. These opportunities (e.g., life stories project, community assessment, community enhancement, community engagement with adults) will promote individual youth development (especially connectedness to adults, school, and community; civic engagement; and planfulness). This project will simultaneously develop and test a program that can be disseminated through Extension, conduct evaluation research on the program itself, and conduct basic research on how natural mentoring relationships form and foster youth development, and how to mobilize communities.
The researchers propose that youth are more likely to make and follow rewarding life plans, succeed in secondary school, and engage in their communities when they have opportunities to work alongside adults to learn about, make plans, and act to improve their communities. Such goal-directed activities are optimal for fostering natural mentoring relationships. By interviewing adults and then creating and communicating their life stories youth will simultaneously learn about how adults have made satisfying lives in their communities and create conditions for developing enduring relationships with the adults whose stories they hear and then communicate to others. The life stories will also provide important information for use in joint planning and action to make communities more supportive of youth.
Secondary school youth and adults in three rural communities will engage in two distinct types of action research – participatory action research and formative program evaluation. In Phase 1, students will participate in humanistic social research on a local level by developing Life Stories. In Phase 2, students will assess community opportunities for adult-youth activities and develop a Community Action Plan. In Phase 3, youth will engage in Community Opportunities (e.g., service learning projects, internships, youth jobs). Because the adult and youth participants in each phase of the project will conduct this research and will be able to shape its design, methods, and reporting, and because it is done as a basis for taking action, it can be classified as participatory action research.
Formative program evaluation, including focus groups, youth interviews, and school records, as well as observations of program activities, will yield findings that have value for improving the program. Summative findings on outcomes will be of interest to participants, and to researchers and practitioners, especially in the field of youth development. This research is designed and conducted primarily by the project investigators with the involvement and consent of the partners. Participants will be involved in both conducting the research and in interpreting the findings and re-shaping the methods and the activities. Findings will be reported quickly, if tentatively, to inform participants and guide next steps. Participants will be invited to help interpret these findings.
Please contact Mary Agnes Hamilton mah15@cornell.edu for more information about opportunities to join the project.
