About YAN
The Young Activists
Network (YAN) is an initiative that aims at organizing youth to
become agents of change in their neighborhood. Young people usually
have the time, the energy, the will, the basic skills, and the right
to participate and help improve the quality of life in the places
where they live. What they lack is appropriate space, support and
recognition. YAN addresses those issues by helping transform existing
community technology centers into community empowering spaces that
offer the basic technical and human resources necessary to foster
sustainable youth-led social change.
By working in partnership
with existing initiatives and by focusing on youth participation,
concrete community challenges, and contextualized uses of technology,
we believe that YAN can help youth and adults involved with local
community centers to organize themselves better, become aware of
new possibilities, share experiences, and build the synergy required
for deep and positive social impact that is more akin to their needs
and aspirations.
Mission
Develop
tools, methodologies and support structures to help transform
community technology centers into spaces that foster and sustain
technology-supported youth-led social change. |
Background
In the Fall of
2002, as a first attempt to turn YAN’s mission into reality,
we organized a 5-week long workshop with kids from a Computer Clubhouse
located in Charlestown (MA). Although that initiative produced some
interesting outcomes – with kids talking about their neighborhood
and contributing to a local community organization – a couple
of methodological and structural issues prevented us from addressing
some of the sustainability and participation elements that lie at
the core of YAN.
In January 2003,
instead of having a canned workshop to be replicated at other sites,
we decided to follow a more decentralized and bottom-up approach.
Beginning with a group of 10 interested Computer Clubhouses from
7 different countries, we started the development of a mutually
supportive network based on the sharing of experiences and best
practices.
The following
couple of months taught us that the implementation of youth-led,
neighborhood-oriented projects required a level of adult support
that went well beyond the one usually offered by the network organizations.
We also learned that the technologies available were either too
complex or inappropriate for the activities that youth were developing.
With those
concerns in mind, in the summer of 2003 we started recruiting volunteers
from local organizations and universities and created the Young
Activists Volunteer Task Force. At that time we also started developing
a series of software tools to make it easier for young people to
represent their communities, document their projects and learn about
what is going on around the network.
Although the
implementation of the software tools will still take a while to
be finished, the Volunteer Task Force proved to be an effective
mechanism that allows us to expand our work and continuously refine
the methodology used. The website of the Young Activists Network
implemented in the summer of 2004 is a concrete attempt to sustain
this movement of growth and self-improvement.
Goals
for 2004 - 2005
For the 2004-2005
period we plan to:
- expand our work beyond the Computer
Clubhouse network
- work to increase the number of
volunteers
- make the Volunteer Task Force
more self-sustainable and self-manageable
- make the website more useful
for young activists and volunteers and community organizations
- keep developing the software tools
We invite your comments and suggestions.Please
email your comments to yan@media.mit.edu. |