Future Forward: Youth Stakeholders

Today’s NYT magazine features a photo essay with contributions of 15 photographers, all 25 years and younger. The reason? “We wanted to see this from the perspective of the city’s younger residents, whose lives have been most upended by the past year and who will be most profoundly affected by the renewal and rebirth that will unfold over the next decade.”

The One Love Symposium will be preparing for our September 2021 preview event by engaging youth in summer programs in 5 locations in southern Michigan: Benton Harbor, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Detroit. We will be visiting each of the participating programs to provide youth with a program outline and discussion questions to support a youth-driven, community-wide data collection process to help us determine just what it is that a teacher, a doctor, and a cop need to be able to do to be good at their jobs…

The competency criteria of the Human Services Professional is all about decision-making. It is a set of assessment skills to build professionals’ ability to interpret human intention, behavior, and circumstance. It exists outside of discipline-specific knowledge. It is informed by that which we all have in common - our universal human values, experiences, and truth.