Young adults as today's and tomorrow's leaders

I believe Whitney sang it best: "I believe the children are our future..." While Ms. Houston's message is nice, from my experience in working with young adults in our community young people are more than our future, they are part of our world today. So why don't we start treating them that way? I can't tell you how many times a week I hear condescending remarks about "young people" and what gets me every time is how those making these remarks miss the mark completely: (1) Talking bad about someone isn't going to motivate them to change their behavior or it is just going to reinforce that bad behavior; (2) If young people are so bad, where do you think they learned it? As Bill Millikin, author of Stop the Epidemic: The Last Dropout states, "We don't have a youth problem, we have an adult problem."

Now I'm not going to be whiny in this entire post and I'm going to talk about a few exciting things when it comes to young people in our community. Here in Central Iowa we have a lot of colleges and universities that support service learning, which gives college students the opportunity to apply what they are learning in class through service in their local community. This past year, United Way of Central Iowa offered the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program as a service learning opportunity, and 30 percent of our volunteers ended up being college students. Additionally, United Way of Central Iowa works with young people all throughout Central Iowa through our Student United Way and The 10,000 Hours Show Show. Both programs have had great outcomes by recognizing more than 17,000 hours of service this past year, and starting up programming at a Boys and Girls Club.

Simply put ,we need to start encouraging and demonstrating positive behavior and stop reinforcing the negative behavior. I'll step off my soapbox now.