Reflection on Forum

Civic Engagement | Jennifer Ventura and Israel (Izzy) Okunlola | Friday August 20, 2010 10:25

There is a famous quote by Spider-Man that says, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Throughout history, adults with power such as mayors, governors, and even presidents disregarded youth as a part of an active voice in our democracy. As stated in an article, Youth, Social Justice, and Communities: Toward a Theory of Urban Youth Policy, the authors revealed “Researchers and policymakers have embraced two dominant perspective on urban youth.” The two perspectives being problem-driven and possibility-driven, but both not positive perspectives. The problem-driven is that youth are usually the main cause of the problems in society. The possibility-driven perspective focuses on what youth can become in the future and only see young people as adults in training. The problem with both of these perspectives is that they leave out youth’s input in the discussion of either fixing problems or laying out plans for the future. They both don’t recognize youth as positive members of the community capable of having positive impact alongside adults in decision making.
    
    In the city of Providence, a coalition of youth organizations called the Youth 4 Change Alliance (Y4C) decided that the next mayor of the city needs to know the issues that youth go through. The alliance decided to do a Mayoral Candidates Forum focusing on youth issues around the city from civic engagement to police in our communities. On August 12, 2010, Angel Taveras, John Lombardi, Steven Costantino, John Scott, and Chris Young were put on stage to answer what their administration will do if they were elected mayor. They had an audience of 175 people to reveal their answers to, and the audience was able to give each candidate feedback on the answers they gave. The audience was presented with three colored cards, red for disagreeing with a candidate’s answer, yellow for being neutral to an answer, and green for agreeing. After each candidate gave an answer, the audience held up their card on how they felt about the candidate’s response. The audience was also presented with report cards which they used to grade each candidate’s response. The public had an opportunity to fully express how they felt the candidate answered the questions. It was a unique way to give the audience the power to act as a teacher and the candidates as students. This helped the audience stay engaged and actually feel that they were an essential part of the forum.

    Being part of this experience was exciting and empowering. I feel that our community now has a different view on young people and what we are capable of achieving. This event demonstrated each of our efforts to create something great and powerful. There was a lot of planning that was involved in creating this event, from  securing a location to the actual interviews with each candidate. As current and future leaders of the world we need to continue spreading our wings, and I feel that this event was a step in the right direction. This type of event has never been done by youth in Providence. We were the ones who managed every aspect of it. Its fortunate to say that we did such a great a job and that it was a total success. Adults can see that we are serious about our community and although we are young and can’t legally vote we still have a say in what happens in our community.

    As for the candidates I feel that they were impressed with the level of professionalism that we young people demonstrated. I feel that they enjoyed the uniqueness of our event and how much detail we put into every part.  One part that surprised the candidates was when we asked them trivia questions. This was kind of a test for us to see how knowledgable they were about our communities and all the issues young people are faced with. They were not expecting this, and it was a way that the audience could see which candidate is really paying attention to the decisions that have an impact on our communities.

    Most of our questions were based on our Youth Bill of Rights (YBoR), which was the reason why we decided to have a Mayoral Candidates Forum. This document was  present in our event, all of our questions were directly related to our Youth Bill of Rights and we even asked the candidates to sign it, if they supported the document. It was a success, all of the candidates signed it and they all agreed that young people deserve and should have these rights. This was personally my favorite part of the event because as a youth who worked on creating the YBoR, I would love for this document to be real. This was the first step, allowing all the candidates to understand and see that young people have a voice and we are not afraid to use it. I hope that in the future who ever becomes mayor can help us begin the process of making the document real.

    In the end we produced an event that both youth and adults enjoyed. I am grateful that at our age we were all a part of this event, it’s not everyday that we see young people dealing directly with politicians and taking a stand on something. I think that we should all be proud of our work and realize that together we can conquer anything. This event was not just a success for us, but for all young people. All the staff members worked really hard to make this possible and its rewarding to see that it all paid off. I am proud of myself and our team, we did a great job and we accomplished all of our goals.