Tag Archives: Youth

Voices

OPINION | Rainier Beach Students Are Right to Ask: What Are We Doing to Keep Them Safe?

by Marcus Harrison Green

(This article is copublished with The Seattle Times.)

I’m not exactly sure what it says about a city when some of its youth believe they must beg to be heard. That puzzle is what landed me inside Rainier Beach High’s cramped library Jan. 18. The occasion was the second student-led town hall on gun violence in as many weeks, a dialogue with Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz to discuss how violence had eroded their mental, physical, and emotional health. 

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News

NEWS GLEAMS | SPS Sue Social Media Companies for Detrimental Effects on Youth; Free West Seattle Water Taxi Rides

A round-up of news and announcements we don’t want to get lost in the fast-churning news cycle!

curated by Vee Hua 華婷婷

Content Warning: This article discusses youth suicide.

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Community

Legacy Letters Fights Isolation With Intergenerational Connections

by Amanda Ong

Legacy Letters is a friendship program in which people from different generations participate in activities that share their life stories. On Jan. 9, Legacy Letters will host a community-building reunion at SouthEast Seattle Senior Center to connect elders and youth. This event will feature new participants in their next series of sessions, which will take place weekly over the following five weeks, and introduce them in turn to previous Legacy Letters participants.

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Voices

OPINION | We Must Listen to the Students

by Mark Epstein and Michael Dixon

Almost 60 years ago, in the middle of two decades of civil rights activism that changed our country,  James Baldwin delivered a speech to teachers, in which he declared that the purpose of education is for students to look critically at their society and to have a vision of change they are willing to fight for. Without such a perspective, he says, we will perish, or follow the worst example of a Nazi youth movement.

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Community

Cheering for the Cheerleaders: The Northwest Premier Junior Football Cheer Competition

by Susan Fried

The gym inside Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines reverberated with the sounds of family, friends, and fans trying to out-cheer each other during the Northwest Premier Junior Football (NWPJF) Cheer Competition. Six teams, including their minis (the youngest teams), competed for trophies and the pride of being the best cheer squad in the league: the CD Panthers, Benson Bruins, Renton Rangers, 5 Star, Jr. Huskies, and HEIR Academy.

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News

King County Youth Rally Together for the 2022 General Election

by Reneé Díaz

This week out on Red Square at the University of Washington (UW), college students are approaching their peers with clipboards in hand, asking if they have registered to vote for the upcoming election.

And young people are teaming up to get the vote out. Various organizations are rallying together on Red Square and outside campus buildings and asking strangers if they are registered to vote, and their members are phone-banking and going into classrooms to encourage each other to fill out their ballots. 

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Voices

OPINION | Expensive Out-of-State Placements Separate Developmentally Disabled Youth From Their Families

“I Want to Go Home” Advocacy Report

The following is an abbreviated and lightly edited chapter from a new systemic advocacy report published by the Office of the Developmental Disabilities Ombuds (DD Ombuds), “‘I Want to Go Home’: Reevaluating DDA’s Children’s Services to Prevent Hospitalization and Out-of-State Placement.” In 2017, the DD Ombuds was created by the Washington State Legislature to improve the lives of persons with developmental disabilities. The DD Ombuds monitors services provided to people with developmental disabilities, reviews facilities and residences where services are provided, resolves complaints about services, and issues reports on systemic issues within the service system. To read the complete report, visit the DD Ombuds website.

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Voices

OPINION | How Youth Mentorship Nurtures Academic, Professional, and Emotional Success

by Raul Melgarejo

Mentorship can uplift confidence and open limitless opportunities for success. As a teenager, I attended St. Andrew Nativity School in Portland where their Graduate Support Program matched me with a mentor to help me navigate the ins and outs of my higher education journey. 

Being part of the first generation in my family to benefit from higher education in the United States, I needed a mentor to provide support in areas that the adults in my life weren’t able to provide, which is why I’m so passionate about advocating for youth mentorship, hence my role as the director of Graduate Support at Seattle Nativity School. The following are three examples of how youth mentorship has impacted the lives of local youth and Seattle Nativity School students.

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Community

How Kaley Duong and Alexis Mburu Became Award-Winning Youth Activists

by Ari Robin McKenna

Kaley Duong and Alexis Mburu knew there was something wrong with school, only it took them a while to find the right words, to know how to phrase them, and to channel their innate leadership ability. In middle school, both joined racial equity clubs that began to illuminate aspects of the issues they were seeing or facing. In high school, both began speaking out more frequently, organizing, and building community around taking action to address the ills of a system they were still in. During the 2021–2022 school year — when Duong was a senior and Mburu a junior — both were unstoppable, working tirelessly for racial equity in schools while organizing, participating in, and speaking at events that impacted thousands.

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News

Another Move in Building the Detective Cookie Chess Park

by Phil Manzano

It doesn’t look like much to people driving by on Rainier Avenue South: a large patch of dirt ringed by temporary chain-link fencing. But to Seattle Police Detective Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, it is part of a long-unfolding vision to help youth through chess and build community.

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