Action Forum for Youth 2021

Action Forum for Youth 2021 is hosted by Influence the Choice in partnership with the Issaquah Schools Foundation, the Lake Washington Schools Foundation, and both Issaquah and Lake Washington School Districts.

It’s a community event, which is held every two years to coincide with the release of the Healthy Youth Survey Data. Its focus is to join youth and adult community leaders to explore the challenges facing today's youth and create sustainable solutions. This year’s focus is on understanding students’ current mental health needs and finding the solutions to the challenge facing today’s youth.

Jerry Blackburn, former Executive Director of Influence the Choice, started explaining the data and resources used today regarding youth experiences and what adults can do to support youth in developing resilience. The goal is to help young people navigate not only the current crisis but also the crisis that they might experience as young people going forward.

Therefore, there are two approaches that adults or the community can take to support young people. One approach is the crisis response. Learn to respond to any crisis from a growth mindset standpoint. Appreciate the nature of it as profound, accept the reality, and do everything to access support systems. In the end, develop a community and make connections around it so that people can get to a place where they have the capacity to deal with the next level of adversity, which our young people will experience. This is a skill set that youth will need as they venture out into the world.

7 Cs of Resilience

Another approach to think about is building resilience skills. Kenneth Ginsburg, MD MS, Ed, FAAP developed the 7 Cs of Resilience model to utilize young people’s strengths to support them in their development so they can bend in adversity rather than break.

1. Competence is to allow young people to experience the struggle within the system and let them recover on their own and learn from it.

2. Confidence means young people believe in their own abilities. Adults can help young people by recognizing the effort they put in rather than focusing on only the results.

3. Connection is to support close ties and belonging and help young people make connections in the community.

4. Character is to support value/spiritual development and opportunities to care for others and encourage empathy, acceptance, and inclusion.

5. Contribution means being of service to others and having the capacity to step away from their own experience and put yourself in the arena of another individual to support them to be successful.

6. Coping is to support/model healthy strategies by encouraging a growth mindset and letting them make decisions. Adults are really role models for healthy demonstrations of resilience and capacity.

7. Control means to let young people have a locus of control so that they can develop the skill sets and capacities to believe in their ability to succeed. Show them their power, which might change their experiences and the experiences of others in a healthy way and maintain high expectations. Overall, as adults, our job is to let our young people know that we unconditionally care in these responses whether they fall and get up or continue struggling.

What’s most important for adults to know? Our young people are resilient but not everybody is in the same boat. Together we can give young people everything that they need going forward so that they are able to bend rather than break. We want them to be successful. It’s the mission for all of us.

This year’s Action Forum invited five youth panelists to answer questions and share their experiences. Here are some of the questions and answers:

Q: The Healthy Youth Survey makes it clear that after 8th grade, students are much more likely to tell a friend or peer if they are struggling rather than telling an adult. How can we make it more comfortable for you to ask adults for help?

It definitely helps when adults come to you as a friend instead of first trying to fix things. I think it’s normal that we don’t always go to our parents but I’ve noticed a lot of adults have been opening up recently. One of my teachers, he took one of the class periods and got the whole class to have a discussion about what we can do in the next couple of weeks to just make his class better. And that was really awesome to see everybody engaged in that because a lot of kids do have a lot of opinions to say. We are just not always asked about it. We keep it to ourselves a lot of the time. (Henry Schriber, Skyline High School)

Q: It can be said that resilience and gratitude can be found in adversity. What do you think you will take away from your time in isolation and how might that affect your future self?

I think most of [the] time for my isolation, it has given me the chance to learn the skills which are needed to overcome pretty much anything that comes my way because I have learned to be more patient and kinder and resilient. The thought of being in quarantine for almost one year and a half makes me feel that it’s a great accomplishment and see if I can learn anything more that I haven’t learned yet. (Meskie Blumenthal, Former PCMS)

Q: What is the number one takeaway that you want us to hear about as we recover from the pandemic and we start to go back into full-time connections and full-time schools and all of these various things?

Allow us to enjoy our youth because there are times that it feels like hard to not be able to do anything while you’re young. Thinking out about the future could be pretty sad and down. It will be good if adults, in general, could just let young people make decisions but make them have consequences for it. (Cash Mendoza, Former PCMS)

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned about yourself during the past year?

I learned how easy it is to get burnt out and how hard it is to get back up from that and how hard it is to be resilient in a timely manner. It is super easy to lose all of your motivation and progress. (Sofia VanHuss, Liberty High School)

Q: How can we help young adults understand that there are resources in our community, such as counseling services, which can intervene prior to someone experiencing an overdose or experiencing something incredible horrific?

Emphasize that kids who come in (to counseling) won’t get in trouble. Destigmatize would be the right word. If it’s possible, make it be really casual, maybe even anonymous. Just make it super comfortable. (Sofia VanHuss, Liberty High School)

Just being there to listen instead of providing solutions or telling them that they need help. (Emma Krohn, Gibson EK High School)

Q: What can the District or the communities do to help you, and especially the kids who don’t have a lot of good friend circles, create opportunities for you to get together? Is that something you’re interested in or is that something you are already doing?

I think it can be really hard to get them to engage. However, what I’ve noticed, though, is if we do things centered around our interests (for example, a field day for people [who] like sports or theater gathering for the theater people), it can be cool to find your social groups and make it a way to express yourself, which I think a lot of us want to express ourselves and express how we’re feeling. It will be cool if we could be put in those circles and have the help of the District to find those circles. (Henry Schriber, Skyline High School)