Healthy Community Initiative

By Martha Lundin as a Guest Columnist for the Northfield News

For the last four years, I worked with high school students as Healthy Community Initiative’s youth engagement coordinator.

I am a youth worker. I became a youth worker by accident. Accident in the way that I did not aspire in high school to become a youth worker. Of course, aspirations would have required knowing youth work was an option; it wasn’t a career path in any post-high school or college counseling pamphlet I looked at.

But over the course of my tenure with HCI, I have been exploring and developing my own sense of what “youth work” is — how it functions and how it continues to revolutionize our world. How youth can be a liberating force if we give young people the space to do so. It is an honor and a privilege to bear witness to young people finding their place in this world. It’s an even greater honor to be able to facilitate spaces for those young people to bring change into their community.

The students I worked with gave out more than $30,000 in grants to youth-led projects in Faribault and Northfield. I connected with more than 300 students participating as youth representatives on boards and commissions. Were you aware that more than 90 high school students serve on City, District, and nonprofit Boards and Commissions in Rice County every year? Youth are not on the fringes of the community–waiting to turn 18 to magically become an active participant. They are in it now.

As adults, we do a disservice to ourselves and our young people by believing the “real world” is something that only exists after high school. What is less real about the world youth live in while they are in school? Is it taxes? Rent? Work? Do we really believe our young people aren’t listening to us as we talk about rising taxes, work stresses and accomplishments, the cost of housing? They are listening. And they are drawing conclusions and asking questions about what their future will look like. It is time adults meet teenagers’ curiosity and passions with not only respect, but also interest.

I know this: youth work is not a job title. It cannot be.

It is a gift to hold space with young people in part because young people show me again and again their commitment to bring change into their community. But you don’t need to be a Youth Engagement Coordinator for a nonprofit to be a person young people can go to.

You can be a youth worker. You can be a source of support, an advocate, a champion for the role young people play in our community as changemakers.

My time with HCI is coming to an end as I prepare to go back to graduate school in the fall for social work. I am so grateful I had this time with youth in Rice County. HCI is committed to building a community where all youth thrive. You are part of that mission. You are part of that future.