Sometimes, young people value doing nothing over doing something.

Why? Positive activities have never been presented to them in a way that addresses their values, which are often misplaced. Many urban youth see professional sports as a realistic job opportunity, define success as earning quick cash and see upward mobility as a goal for someone else. Viewing life through this lens, many cannot see their own limitations and do not have the ability to ask the right questions to change their life trajectory.  White-collar work is considered unachievable and blue-collar work is considered beneath them. Many are afraid of failure, or will say they don’t want to be a statistic. But often, underserved youth don’t truly understand how to avoid that outcome.  

After-school activities can play an important role in this scenario, selling the concepts of academics and upward mobility via a vehicle that youth are engaged in and value. By appealing to a young person’s current values, after-school programs can ultimately change those values and make future success much more likely. 

To help bridge the values gap, volunteers and staff in after-school programs are the cornerstone. Good intentions are great and needed, but without the correct drive and passion, the work of volunteers and staff is just glorified babysitting. Good staff members need self-fulfillment and satisfaction, and they also need to communicate properly with youth in order to help create more positive, realistic values.

One example of positive relationship-building is at Chicago Training Center, which trains urban youth in the sport of competitive rowing. Here, volunteer coaches engage in one-on-one mentoring with participants. Each of the 16 coaches focuses on fostering a positive out-of-school relationship with a few participants, to explore what is happening in their lives and support them during the critical teen years. Using rowing as a very real metaphor for self-improvement, each mentor discusses goal-setting, plans for improvement, and how to overcome barriers (real or imaginary) to plot an achievable course for life success. Since rowing is an “alternative” sport, we use the veil of “athletics” in general to direct the teens’ focus to travel, education, scholarships, and life experiences - things that all youth can wrap their heads around.  With their interest piqued - something that can be achieved by any after-school activity with the right leaders – we have an unlimited ability to positively impact the young people who participate in our program.

To recreate this success, leaders in after-school programs need to be supported and given the tools they need to develop skills to help underserved youth. 

Accomplishing this will take adequate money and resources, so funders are a critical component of the equation. Funders want statistics and outcomes---attendance, data, scalability, and replication are the name of the game. They want a winner, and need to identify the winners by a narrow set of indicators. They understand that all programs “care about kids,” but questions of cost are ever-present because dollars are scarce and resources limited. 

So how do we align visions to ensure that thousands of kids who are currently doing nothing after school get involved in something? To achieve this goal, we must figure out how to maximize the work of staff members, keep funders engaged and fully support youth.

Optimistically, the time is right. Chicago is ready for a seismic shift in how to work with school-age children. The “village” required to raise a child is actually a city ripe for that challenge. We need to continue to push for collaboration among after-school programs, to leverage resources, create a network of providers across the city, launch a system that will allow children to find out information about programs, and put the right support structure in place to fully engage the families of our youth. 

If we as a city start to make moves in this direction, we would begin to see a significant lowering of the drop-out rate and in youth violence, and an increase in higher education placement.  The city would get a much-needed breath of fresh air from our younger generation.

Montana Butsch founded the Chicago Training Center, which trains underserved youth in the sport of competitive rowing, in 2006. He is a member USRowing's Task Force on Access, Affordability, and Diversity and participates in Chicago’s Out-of-School Time Project.

Student achievement and success later in life is achieved when youth have proper support and supervision, and are in an environment conducive to pushing boundaries and with a high bar set for accomplishment.  Acknowledging this, Chicago Public Schools plans to extend the day at select schools and will offer computer-based instruction in addition to other after-school enrichment activities. 

But after-school programs don’t need to be academic in nature to be beneficial and schools cannot be expected to address all the challenges that face our city’s youth in isolation. New research shows that engaging youth in positive activities beyond the school day results in positive social change.  For example:

•    A study by After School Matters found that students who participated in its programs missed fewer days of school than their classmates and had higher graduation rates and lower dropout rates than similar students who did not participate.

•    Other studies have found that youth at highest risk benefit most, and that the after-school hours are the prime hours for juvenile crime for those youth who do not have access to after-school programs.

My organization, the Chicago Training Center, offers youth an enhanced opportunity to achieve through non-traditional sports programming – rowing. 

In order to provide this program we, like many other providers, have formed relationships with a variety of organizations, government agencies and private foundations.  Though these partnerships are critical to our success, it has become clear to us that the current web-like system for providing after-school programs needs to change fundamentally if our communities are to ensure that every young person who wants to enroll in an after-school program has the opportunity to do so.

Some of the problem is financial. In many cases, large public institutions like Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Park District have been stretched to the limit financially. There are simply not enough funds to meet current, let alone future, demand. Other highly esteemed institutions (After School Matters & the Department of Family and Support Services) simply cannot fund as many programs as they would like. 

But funding is not the only problem. The system lacks fluidity and transparency and is unable to adapt as, over time, the age, location or ethnic character of its target audience changes. As a result, some programs are oversubscribed, while others rarely operate at full capacity. And in far too many cases, the achievement bar is woefully low or even unmeasured. 

Luckily there are signs of potential change:

•    Legislation recently passed in Springfield and awaiting Governor Pat Quinn’s signature will begin to address these problems and create a framework for coordinating and strengthening after-school services in Illinois.  The After-School Youth Development Project Act (SB 3543), developed by ACT Now! (a coalition of after-school providers and advocates, including the Chicago Training Center), will for the first time support access to after-school programs as state policy.  While this will not, by itself, solve the funding problem, it will create a transparent, sustainable, replicable and responsive after-school system with greater accountability and universal metrics by which to judge impact.

•    The Chicago OST Project (a partnership of Chicago Public Schools, After School Matters, the Department of Family and Support Services, Chicago Park District and Chicago Public Library) has created a data system called CitySpan that now promises cross-agency linked information about programs and participants, including more than 200,000 youth and 1,000 program sites. The Project has also established a baseline of common standards and measures for program quality across the programs they fund.
 
•    Several organizations and initiatives, like the OST Project’s AfterschoolChicago.org, Cabrini Connections, and IllinoisOutcomes.org, have also made inroads toward mapping the landscape of services available in our communities for multiple constituencies.

All of these efforts, while significant, are still in the formative stage and require different mixtures of funding, time and leadership to fully realize their promise. The public, families and young people need clear, easy-to-use, accountable information on the universe of options available to them, now regardless of the funding source.  Currently, this is not available. For instance, the Jesse White Tumbling Team—arguably the most well-known and successful Chicago-based youth nonprofit—would not turn up on the OST Project’s Afterschoolchicago.org site, as the team does not receive financial support from the agenc