Coordinators Corner: Their City, Their Teacher

WE'RE BACK!

After a brief hiatus we're back with more YEF news, tips and resources for all of our readers and community partners. We're starting a new series called "Coordinators Corner" to highlight some best practices our staff has learned and would like to share with youth workers in San Francisco and beyond.

We want to bring you blogs that will help you support your youth plus encourage communication and collaboration among the amazing organizations in SF serving young people. So, leave a comment with a question or a new topic you'd like to see us cover and we'll do our best to share content that will be helpful.

San Francisco Mapping Activity

Living and working in a major city like San Francisco we can get so consumed with the hustle and bustle of routine that we often forget that our lives only cover so much of the 46.9 square miles SF has to offer. Humans are creatures of habit and none more than young people.

Youth in San Francisco--as in any other place-- have their own routines.  They have their favorite hang out spots (T-Pumps high on the list) and their frequented routes from school to home to after school sites and then back home again. While they might see more diversity of culture and class in their daily route than a teen in a small town or suburb, their own experience only tells a part of the story of the city.

YEF Advisory Board (YEFAB) map their lives in SF

Often in youth empowerment programming, we want to highlight and uphold the knowledge-rich experiences of young people. However, it is also important to show them a wider world of diverse experiences outside of their realm of consciousness. The balancing act between providing programming that does both can be exhausting.

Doing a mapping activity that pinpoints where youth spend most of their time, allows them to both share their experience with the group and highlights the places and experiences that they might not see in their daily lives.

Suggested Mapping Activity Steps:

• Print out or create a digital map of San Francisco (or your own city).
• Ask youth use pieces of paper or digital pinpoint to indicate where they live, go to school, work, hang out with friends and shop (create more categories that might reflect the activity goal)
• Have youth share with the group their points.
• As a group look for patterns (where are there a lot of pins, where are there not as many, why?).
• Have youth do research or explore an area they are unfarmiliar with and present back to the group at a later meeting.

*For more info on how to make your own map and other urban civic engagement resources check out the "Make Your PLACE" curriculum made available through Catlin Gabel.