Fund Youth Programs Instead Of Youth Punishment!

I attended a community meeting today, and it reminded me of something my older brother once said. At the community meeting, the speaker noted the importance of putting funding into programs that help prevent youth from getting in trouble instead of putting funding into the punishment of youth, for example Juvenile Hall.

How does this relate to what my brother said? My older brother would say, “My life would probably be different it I was in a Pee Wee League or Pop Warner Football. It’s just too bad I never knew about these programs until it was too late. And even if I knew, our family would not have been able to pay for it.”

It helped me realize that all these programs exist, yet youth cannot be involved in these programs because they or their family cannot afford to be involved in these programs. Because youth cannot afford to be in these programs, they turn to alternative things to pass their time, sometimes good and sometimes bad.

For my brother, it was bad. The bad meant spending time with friends and getting involved with drugs and gangs instead of playing football, due to our family lacking the resources for my brother to play and participate. To this very day, my brother still wonders how different his life would be if our family did not lack the resources for him to play football or be involved in other programs.

The kNOw Youth Media

The kNOw works to support and equip young people with the journalism and advocacy skills they need to tell their stories and the stories of their communities.

In 2006, over 25 youth began participating in weekly after-school writing workshops where they congregated in the hallway of a two-story building in West Fresno and learned the essentials of creating media and telling their stories. The group evolved over the next five years and is now proudly recognized as The kNOw Youth Media.

Through our program, we create opportunities for our youth participants, who in turn create long-term positive change in their communities. Our approach weaves youth development and youth media innovation to produce our biannual youth publication, multimedia projects, and community forums.

The kNOw began as a project of New America Media, which was the country’s first and largest national collaboration and advocate of 2000 ethnic news organizations. In 2018 The kNOw became a project of Youth Leadership Institute.