Youth Encouraging Success: It is all about us

The Proviso Action Committee is a community coalition designed to promote positive youth development through local policy change in Proviso Township. The vision is to build a sustainable partnership of community stakeholders who are dedicated to systemic solutions that help youth achieve success. Given the challenge of engaging and sustaining youth in the collaborative process we established Youth Encouraging Success program (YES). YES is a youth-led arm of Proviso Action Committee which uses a popular education model to build the team and to accomplish its goals. The popular education process empowers groups who are disenfranchised socially and politically to achieve their goals. YES is designed to explore the relationship between self-image, identity, and youth well-being in the context of race, class, age, and gender. The team created a multi-media interactive website for teens with blog, photo-essays and video diaries to promote critical consciousness around self-image and identity.The youth team design and maintain the site as well as provide quarterly face to face events, field trips, and discussion. Multi-ethnic youth aged 14 and older participate from 4 local high schools. This paper describes the challenges and benefits of YES and the impact of YES on youth critical consciousness, well-being and the adult-youth communication. YES transformed disenfranchised youth to become empowered advocates for themselves and their community.