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| Teleconference Transcript Transcript of NCSET teleconference call held on February 11, 2004 Community YouthMapping: Are You on the Map?Presenters: Raul Ratcliffe and Eric Kilbride DR. CRANE: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kelli Crane and I am with the National Center on Secondary Education and Transition (NCSET) and I work at TransCen, Inc., in Rockville, Maryland. Today’s call is titled “Community YouthMapping: Are You on the Map?” Our presenters are Raul Ratcliffe and Eric Kilbride who are both from the Academy for Educational Development (AED), Center for Youth Development and Policy Research. Before I turn it over to Raul and Eric, I want to share with you the format of this call and lay out some ground rules. First of all we will have presentation time by both Raul and Eric and then we will turn over to questions and answers at the end of their presentation. We ask that you share both your name and the state that you’re calling from before you ask your question. To avoid background noise we ask that you place your phones on mute. If you don’t have a mute feature you can simply press *6. We also ask that you don’t put your phone on hold, because when you do that we hear your background music on the call. Now I would like to turn it over to Raul and Eric. We are very excited about this conference call. We have heard from all of you and have been learning that this concept of mapping is of great interest, and as you know NCSET has been doing some mapping around building systems. Today Raul and Eric will talk about our youth mapping community. Community YouthMapping (CYM) is the way for you to identify and learn about resources in that community. This is an exciting initiative. We are pleased to be sharing this with you today. So Raul and Eric, I’ll turn it over to you. MR. KILBRIDE: This is Eric and in a moment or two you will hear from Raul. What we want to do in this call is:
So those are the four areas that we are going to touch upon over what we hope to be about a 25-minute time period and then we really look forward to hearing from you all in terms of the questions that you have in the interest areas that are on your mind. CYM has a definition, if you will, of a process in which young people and adults canvas their neighborhoods in search of places to go and things to do for young people, children, and families. When you think about the term CYM you can equally emphasize each part of that: the community part, the youth part, and certainly the mapping part of it. Young people traditionally with our process have gone and canvassed the neighborhood looking for all kinds of information and communities have done it for many different reasons. We started CYM at the Center here at AED in 1995 and since that point we have implemented it in over 80 communities across the country and actually a couple places internationally. Communities do it for a variety of reasons. A couple of examples with the city of Baltimore: when they first decided to do CYM they were interested in how to mobilize young people and adults across geographic boundaries. That is what they were interested in doing and this was the process that they really engaged the community to come together beyond their own neighborhood line so to speak, and use that information to help build a city-wide youth agenda, a youth vision for the community and so through a variety of ways the youth mapping process was able to accomplish that goal. CYM over the last year-and-a-half has been used increasingly more to satisfy the Workforce Investment Act, the resource mapping component, the youth councils have to do satisfy the legislation and so young people have set out to collect information from employers, organizations, etc. around the ten service elements. Some of those include things like occupational training skills, alternative educational opportunities, mentoring, job shadowing, etc. But they have been able to use the process to satisfy that particular grid. And there have been several other issue areas if you will, that have evolved over the last several years. Things that range anywhere from issues around employment, to food mapping, obesity prevention, health mapping, HIV, tobacco, just a variety of things. Anything that young people and adults are involved in together to collect good community data. So that’s kind of where CYM is and has been. It’s important to think about this in a couple of ways as you consider doing this process. Part of what we do generally with the community is that we have a series of conversations to determine where the community is in terms of why they want to do a CYM process. What would they be interested in using the data for? How do they plan to make that data accessible back to the community, if that’s important to them, back to making it accessible to other young people, parents, people that need to make decisions that improve the lives of young people. These are the kinds of questions that we ask from the very beginning, before one even sets foot out to collect data. There are important issues to consider, because what it does in order for the CYM process to work well and for it to be sustainable into the future, you have to have this community commitment. There has to be a buy-in from a variety of stakeholders and partners and I know lots of you are a part of groups like that. Really grappling with answering those questions becomes a springboard into planning to do the process. There are a variety of ways in which CYM could be implemented. Sometimes the young people use a survey instrument in order to collect the data and they literally do either a cold call or they set appointments and they go out literally to businesses, organizations, etc. and sit down for a ten-minute interview, to extract the information. They also do it over the phone from time to time, they also conduct focus groups, there is also a version of youth mapping that allow youth-to-youth opinion surveys or youth-to-adult surveys and in that regard they get more qualitative information. Observational mapping has been used quite a bit to do and measure things around space, green space, accessibility, and conditions of food. It has been all over the place and how folks use the CYM strategy. So hopefully that begins to broaden your mind in the way that you think about CYM; that it’s essentially an information collection process done ideally by young people and adults. To support the data that’s collected, if you will, it is going to jump right into the data and the technology and Raul will touch on the training and the technical assistance part, but the technology to support that – for many years communities really struggled with, where to put their data? What to do with the collected data? When I worked on a local level in Indianapolis that was certainly something that we struggled with. How do you continue to also keep that information up-to-date, current and dynamic, so that when young people and parents, for example, go to access this data that they have confidence that it is accurate, that is going to give them the information they need to make a good decision, that’s really the length that we come out this and what we have been striving to do with our technology. Technology is still in order to really reduce one of the barriers for communities to keep their information up-to-date and current. So we have created a couple of Web-based systems. When we talk about technology we mean it from a couple of different ways. One is what we call our national CYM Web site. That is the external Web site, one of the ways communities make their data accessible in the community, to young people and parents and that web address you might have, but it’s http://www.communityyouthmapping.org and that is all one word and again we will give that web address again a little later if you didn’t get it. That’s one part of the technology; the other part of the technology is frankly the online data entry system that supports that external side and it’s a password protected site that we set up with communities that enables not only the young people but also the adults and the folks associated with the process to be able to enter data that’s been collected as well as update, add to it, maintain and then ultimately approve the data so it is part of the quality control process with CYM and so with that you create the ability for that information to go into the CYM national Web site that I described before, but you also have the ability to export that data into a variety of ways that local communities need to see it and access it and manipulate it. So, communities can export it so it would match into an Access database for example or you can export into existing geographic information software that a community might be using. That is the GIF software that allows information to be plotted on a map and that’s a fundamental component to our process, because we collect address information with the other information fields that one is looking for that information ultimately can be layered into a map for analysis and so when you began to think about technology I wanted you all to know that we see it in a couple of different ways. Our online data entry system has two ways to go about it:
So you get to sense that there are two systems to meet the needs that you have. That’s a quick overview of the technology and now to training in technical assistance. MR. RATCLIFFE: The training and technical assistance that is separately provided certainly through our process as we talk about CYM is probably done in three phases.
These three areas in implementing a CYM process are that we found; obviously there is a local course implementing CYM. It is all of the things in terms of staffing and that would probably be your highest line item, your project manager or project coordinator, your field supervisor. If you are paying the mapping team, which we recommend but some have been compensated through school credit, service learning credit, other ways and then your operations cost, you know you are meeting, your food and transportation, field communication, the space of the young people who are going to meet at – those kinds of things. The second area for the training and technical assistance course and that is really a time and travel line item just to give you an idea of what it comes out doing. I am just giving you an idea that the trainees that I was describing, the young people, a group of 30 young people, one day for the field supervisors, one day for the lead organizations. So you get an idea of how long we usually spend in a site. And then you have the training or the area of course where we talk about the data management and dissemination system. Eric is trying to describe it over this call, as you know it is hard to describe. If you go to http://www.communityyouthmapping.org you will certainly get a better sense of the dissemination tool and all the data that’s collected to support that site. The videos for CYM are also on the site because they were interested partners. What is this? What is it about? There is a CYM Close Up button and CYM Overview button on the home page. The Close Up specifically highlights one site in Pinellas County, Florida, that has done the mapping and then the Overview gives you seven sites more of a ten-step business CYM, the bigger picture. There is also text versions, when we talk about the cyberway compliance, when we talk about the site is cyberway compliant. We are certainly working towards improving and enhancing and moving forward on that. So these were the four things that we wanted to put out there and I think at this point, which I think we have done well in terms of time, we will open it up for any questions. MR. WHITE: My name is Frank White, from New York State. Is there any funding available to support this? MR. RATCLIFFE: Typically in communities the funding that has supported community’s mapping over the last actually – probably the last 35 sites has been through the Workforce Investment Board. And they have been through the youth councils, they been able to identify and our pay lead organizations to manage the process in New York. MR. KILBRIDE: Frank, where are you in New York State? MR. WHITE: Upstate, Fort Edward, in Washington County. MR. KILBRIDE: Only reason why I ask is we have done a quite a bit of mapping in upstate New York through the Workforce Investment Boards that Raul just described. So, there is typically money available. We haven’t worked in Washington County so that certainly might be an avenue, but also communities of, paper communities mapping in other ways, either they have some issues and specific grants that the community is working on to fulfill that involves young people, and United Ways have been interested partners in helping support a process like this as well as community foundations and city governments. There have been a lot of creative ways that folks have been able to access money by describing CYM. One of the tools that we provide sites that help them do that is we’ve developed pretty broad sample proposals for local communities to use and customize that really give them the language, and the benefits and it outlines the process and all that. So, when you are seeking to do that kind of fundraising, we can certainly help you with that tool. MR. WHITE: That would be excellent, because the program that I work with, we have six programs right now in six different counties. And up there in Plattsburg, which is one of the sites where we did a CYM project. We have one our youth program is up there right now. And then we have one that’s in Albany County, Schenectady, Warren County, you know, it is so spread out all over the state. MR. KILBRIDE: You know, it’s funny, Frank, because you are surrounding all the places there we work. So, I think outside of this call we will speak directly to you about how to help you get going. MR. WHITE: Excellent. MS. WALSTON: And this is Eileen Walston in Monroe County in Rochester, New York. Have you done anything in western New York around asset mapping? Around youth mapping? MR. RATCLIFFE: Well, define western New York for me. We’ve been in Cirque. That’s not probably western enough, is it? MS. WALSTON: Ah well, depends on whose map you look at. MR. RATCLIFFE: There you go. I think Cirque is as far west as we’ve been in state, Oswego has been up near the Canadian border and bordering along from Mont and that area all the way down to New York City. So, that’s kind of been the line if you will. MS. WALSTON: Okay, thank you. MR. NURSE: This is Tom Nurse, Florida. I live in Pinellas County, and I’ve never heard of it. MR. KILBRIDE: It’s implemented through the 4H in Largo. And then they also work with a group in South St. Petersburg. So this is two areas that are working there in Pinellas County around CYM. They did CYM in a way that Raul and I described for the first time in 1998 and since then they have evolved their process. Pinellas County is a good representation that CYM may not look like we just talked about it a couple of years from now once you do it. But, what happens in Pinellas County is that young people are very much involved in collecting information and keeping it current and therefore also have an input with the County Commissioners there. They are part of the Youth Council that advises the County Commissioner Structure of Pinellas County. And they also do a Youth as Resources model, if some of you are familiar with that, where they take the data that’s collected, they analyze it, and then they make small grants to other youth groups to help meet the needs that are identified by that data. So, you can kind of see where, when you watch the video or when you go to http://www.communityyouthmapping.org and you access the Pinellas County data you begin to see how they have evolved the CYM process. The outstanding thing is the fact that young people and adults are very much working together around data and that’s what we strive for. MR. NURSE: The follow-up question I’m then hoping that the school uses as part of their transition planning as looking at the community resources available to kind of link into? MR. KILBRIDE: I think that’s absolutely a strategy that folks can consider, that particular model you are describing right now in a process of trying to figure out how to do in San Diego. San Diego is very much interested in the model you describe and we are learning together really how that’s going to apply when you get into the school situation. We implemented CYM in school systems for school credit for example and it’s always been an interesting process so there are some examples of that I could certainly share with you. MR. NURSE: I am looking at your Web site. So, on your Web site where do you go to find the specifics of Pinellas? MR. KILBRIDE: The video is, actually the CYM Close Up is the Pinellas County documentation of their experience. So certainly we will describe for you in about four minutes: their process and what it is that they set out to do. MR. RATCLIFFE: We are looking for the data, Tom. You would look just, when you went to http://www.communityyouthmapping.org you would go to select site and then you would choose under the state of Florida, Pinellas County and once you pull up Pinellas County site you’ll have two different ways to go about this again. Pinellas County has really pushed the envelope. Up in the upper left hand corner you will see the youth mapping logo for Pinellas County, you can click on that and that will take you straight into their Web site, or you could go through the search on our Web site, either way, and both will yield the kinds of data that are on their site. MR. KILBRIDE: We encourage communities to make the process as seamless as possible so if they want to link their specific activity page to another site that when people want to search for resources they can just click if they can are going into another site or click there and they will come into our site and search for resources and it will be as seamless as possible. MR. NURSE: It’s very cool. Thank you. MS. PETERSON: This is Colleen from Nebraska. I have been talking about CYM with a number of people in the transition field but you mentioned something and I don’t know if I missed your explanation. What is 508 compliance? MR. RATCLIFFE: Well what’ve we had done is we needed to get our site, we have gotten our site to be accessible to young people with disabilities. MS. PETERSON: Okay, so you were talking about your Web site accessibility. I didn’t know if there was something else I needed to be wary of as far as implementing this in the community. MR. RATCLIFFE: No. What we have done just so you all know is we worked in sites not exclusively with young people with disabilities but certainly in a simulated environment that included young people with disabilities and I use that to be very inclusive in terms of what we mean with young people with disabilities and so we have had that experience not only from the training, but during the implementation, the information collection, the analysis, the presentations, the advocacy, all those parts from the beginning to where they are at now. MS. PETERSON: Okay. Now my other question is how rural are some of these 35 sites you have been in? MR. RATCLIFFE: We have been 80 places, and that is a great question. I think some of the rural places that we have been in, we have been in Alaska, several rural places and certainly when you talk about the 11 counties in Southern Indiana that were very rural. MR. KILBRIDE: Brian can even attest to the upstate New York area with the Adirondacks, the whole geographic issue you have to deal with there are most of those counties are largely rural with presumably not a lot of resources but yet the process has been meaningful for the adults and the young people for a variety of reasons. We often hear, why should I do this if I know there is not much there? When we were in Southern Indiana young people used to tell us when we came down there to train, they said, what do you do here for fun and they said well “We jump off the bridge,” and we said okay, but what else do you do, “No, we jump off the bridge” and that was the extent at least for this group of young people. They didn’t believe there was anything else out there for them in terms of employment, other kinds of opportunities, use of space, etc. So, rural communities have been a good part of the number of sites that we have been in. MS. PETERSON: Wyoming or Montana? MR. KILBRIDE: No, we haven’t. MS. PETERSON: Okay, I have worked with people in those states so if you have been there then I wanted to connect with them. MR. RATCLIFFE: Alaska is probably there, and obviously California, Colorado, and Iowa. MS. PETERSON: Iowa would be good. MR. RATCLIFFE: Iowa, that is a bordering place. Kansas City, Missouri, West Missouri. MS. PETERSON: Kansas? MR. RATCLIFFE: Yeah, Kansas City in Missouri and then St. Louis, Missouri. Kansas is something we are looking this summer but Kansas City might be a good one even though it is a little more urban. MS. PETERSON: There would be somebody in Kansas who would have a rural area that they were covering? MR. RATCLIFFE: Without a doubt. MR. KILBRIDE: And they are on the site if you wanted to go look and places that we are talking about. MR. RATCLIFFE: Yeah, they have a very rich database. MS. PETERSON: Okay, thank you. MR. RATCLIFFE: I have a question, Kelli. This is Raul and I know that people asked some very good questions towards the end, did this call answer the questions that you had about CYM, why did you call in, was my question, what kind of things were you looking for or interested in or what components were you interested in CYM? If anybody is out there certainly to help me understand a little bit more. MR. NURSE: I was certainly calling in because it seems like one of the critical tools in transition planning is going and seeing what is available in the community to link beyond. And that was of great interest to me and this is also service a great source of embarrassment to tell you the truth. Not even be aware of my own community, what is available, but it’s certainly is an eye opener and actually having just gone through and tried it, it is incredibly powerful to have that interactive of a database to be able to identify what are the rules, but it also quite disturbing to have something that is in-depth as this done and not have seen it. MR. RATCLIFFE: And I am glad you said that Tom, because one of the things on two levels that mappers notice when they are in their communities is that they notice resources in the communities that they never connected, so you knew we are there and the strong connections that are built through this process, that’s one level of it. The other level of it is that, through this process will also encourage communities to better promote the things that they are working on like CYM and the data. We really think about in the beginning of the process, how they get that data out there or how they push you know, they message not that is just on our Web site but that, there is other stuff going on building that community development process and really beginning to advertise and think smarter about marketing the good things that are occurring in the community. So, I am glad you said that. MR. NURSE: Of course as you are mapping, when that mapping started, do you look for collaborating partners that will utilize this resource afterwards so that you try to build some assurances that all the effort will bear some fruit? MR. RATCLIFFE: Yes, one of the things we ask people to do is to set up an advisory group if you will, consisting of multiple sectors, public, private, non-profit. One of the things we talked about in 1995 here at the Center, CYM as we talk about it was really done in 1991 in New York City. It was a means to an end; it was a way to get through an information phone line called the youth line, which is still up and running in New York City. And that was City government driven and owned and so what began to happen was that after the administration changed they began to neglect the information phone line again, and then because of community outline, because of other people saying that we needed this in the community they began to get more support, but we encourage people to have all sectors or at least as many sectors as they can on an advisory group so that its everybody’s data and nobody’s data at the same time, if you know what I mean. And so that’s one of the things that we certainly strive with communities to include in the very beginning, when we talked about that community orientation and that press session, they have that focus at the table prior to even going there so I am glad you brought that up. MR. NURSE: I am missing the meeting right now of our collaborators transition group for Pinellas and I will be sure to bring this back up as a underutilized resource and I appreciate all your efforts. MR. RATCLIFFE: What I think could be helpful is if you click on the Pinellas County logo you will get the contact information there locally and it would be best to contact the local coordinator there and she would be delighted to welcome your group at some point with open arms about how to expand it and get the word out. MR. NURSE: And we have to be there. MR. RATCLIFFE: Right. DR. CRANE: This is Kelli Crane. Tom, I am familiar with what you are talking about. Raul and Eric, I think Tom brings up a good question in how this youth mapping can tie into the individual transition planning of the young people with disabilities. I don’t know if you have examples of that in any other communities or is that something we can explore further in our conversation, but it is something of a resource that we could definitely can pull into the schools and asking kids who are doing their planning, their transition planning, to access this data would be very helpful for young people with disabilities. MR. NURSE: Yeah, I think that is something that we can explore specifically about being intentional, I think all of the data that is available can be helpful in putting together that kind of plan but that intentionality we can explore about how to do that, certainly, within a school context. DR. CRANE: Yes, absolutely. MS. STORMS: This is Jane Storms, I am from the Western Regional Resource Center at the University of Oregon. I got on the call because I am interested in participating in this exiting community, but I am intrigued with this. We work with 13 states and only one of our states, Alaska, is represented on here. I have been going around on the site, it is a really neat resource and my question is how do you go about putting yourselves out there for either states or communities to get engaged just by this kind of thing and then passing it along? MR. KILBRIDE: That is a great question and the answer would be really long. This is one of the ways in reaching audiences, and we certainly have the ads and articles in certain publications, you will find our ad regularly in Youth Today for example and the National League of Cities just did a nice article on the Alaska efforts, the Columbus, Ohio effort, and some others. The National League of Cities reaches Mayors and elected officials. There are a variety of ways – we do several conference presentations, you know the typical kinds of ways that the things are out there. We are going to be presenting at the Pathways to Adulthood National Conference for Independent Living and Transitional Living here in Washington, DC in mid-April. We did the National Youth Development Summit last November, and are doing it again. There are a lot of different ways that we are trying to get out there and in fact we just met with Oregon Public Broadcasting, they came out here probably three weeks ago and they were interested in the documentary and our story on CYM if there was some thing going on in Oregon/Northern California and so that just might be something for you to think about as the possibility in that at least the public broadcasting folks were very interested. MR. RATCLIFFE: Typically when a community contacts us we will provide at least electronically and certainly over the phone the information about CYM, what it is, they will ask several questions about the kinds of data that they are interested in collecting. One of the features that Eric was talking about is the concern that the online data entry system is highly customizable to meet the needs of special interest issues in communities, so typically a community will contact us and we will go through that initial stage and then will formally go through sort of like a community orientation if they feel there is enough interest in the community and we talk through the partners that have been at the table and you know the sites will let us know what partners will and will just won’t come to the table in some sites. MR. KILBRIDE: One other thing to just clarify, Jane specifically, but it is for everybody, on the http://www.communityyouthmapping.org Web site there are 45+ sites that are listed there. We have been in 80 places and so that means there are several places that maybe did not have the interest to put their data up in this format, it was not why they wanted to do it, they were doing some other kind of CYM processes that didn’t lend itself to this kind of dissemination. There are a lot of places that frankly we were in that predated the technology in its current format and in fact a lot of those are West Coast heavy. So, just some things to keep to mind in terms of places we have been and opportunities to even grow and expand in some of those places. MS. STORMS: Thanks a lot. DENNIS: This is Dennis in Nebraska and I have one other question for you. My question just simply is, can you give us some more examples of some real positive outcomes specifically that have really affected kids in transition and in some specifics if you could, specifics plus? MR. KILBRIDE: Sure, I will give a relatively recent one, and this involves a young woman from Alaska. She was part of a village community there and she had a few identified disabilities, but she is a single mother of two and she wandered by and just stopped by a one-stop work center, and was looking for a way to somehow complete her GED. And she wandered in and we were starting that CYM process there in Alaska. She obviously was involved in the process and she has now been hired as the GIS expert, for the cook in the tribal council there near Anchorage and she now has that full time position that pays pretty well – not to mention, she had the opportunity to make a couple of presentations not only there in Alaska, in Juno to the State Department of Labor, but also she was featured at the National Youth Development Summit, here in Washington, DC this last November and it really was an opportunity for her for the first time with some other folks to leave the State of Alaska and really opened her eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. I am going on about how it has changed her life in particular. MR. RATCLIFFE: And one of her goals, her funnier side was to actually, to stick her foot in the Potomac when she was here in DC and she talks about that still today, just as an experience, but it’s one of those things where, she talked about - how she never thought she would be involved and engaged in the process like that. MR. KILBRIDE: From a community impact, we did this in Indianapolis and the young people came back with a lot of recommendations and frustrations and one other thing that was identified was transportation, both routes and fares and accessibility to those folks who needed public transportation in order to access services and programs. And so young people came back, because they had this public/private group that Raul described earlier, and they were able to plug into and the adults helped, the young people plug into ways to make change there and as a result two young people sit on this Citizens Transit Advisory Group there now with full voting rights and that group is the group that affect fares, bus routes, and other kinds of services to meet the community’s needs there. It’s had a tremendous impact in the way that public transportation is being used and the input young people have in that, so that’s a personal kind of experience and then a community change experience. MR. WHITE: This is Frank calling from New York again. What are the fees, say if you have a group of folks and community people I want to work together on this project. What’s the fee for you guys to come out and do this type of training that you are talking about? MR. KILBRIDE: The fee – I guess it varies – we talked about the number of days of trainings. What you would be paying for, Frank – time and travel is really what you are paying for, there is no other fee associated with the training part of it. When we talked about the training side of CYM the investment on the local level is going to probably be the most expensive part of it, when you talk about the staffing part of it for the process like this. When you talk about meeting costs, we come in terms of fees well under that part of it. We are typically the smallest part of your budget. MR. RATCLIFFE: And Frank, when you say, “This is what we would be looking for,” and if it’s one day or two days or whatever it might be, we just cost it out right there as pretty quick as painless process for us, but it varies and so you know we are just we deal with it on a site-by-site basis. DR. CRANE: Okay, I want to thank Raul and Eric
for sharing with us the youth development strategies. Youth, families,
and others can learn more about the resources in that community
and build on those resources on their Web site http://www.communityyouthmapping.org.
It’s a wonderful and extremely informative site, so I suggest
you take a moment and check it out it. It’s really great information.
I know some of you will also be contacting Raul and Eric individually,
we will have the transcript from this call available, and it will
probably be on the NCSET Web site within the next couple of weeks
and that Web site is http://www.ncset.org.
We will have another teleconference call coming up in March. Stay
tuned to the NCSET Web site and E-news for more information on that
upcoming call. Thank you everyone on the call today; especially
thank you to Raul and Eric. This call was extremely informative. END OF TELECONFERENCE
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