Strive Media uses mass communications to connect with youth and build valuable skills. Sports and Life draws on the popularity of soccer to accomplish a similar aim. Social entrepreneurs around the world employ these and other types of "hooks" such as poetry, construction trades, sports, food, playwriting, photography, art, and gardening to ensure that young people develop their capacities in positive ways.

These programs share a common feature that distinguishes them from traditional youth-focused programs: they take something which is, at its core, quite simple, often familiar, and sometimes utterly conventional, and they use it to turn conventional thought on its head in order to develop young people.

Sports and Life is about more than teaching young people to play soccer, just as Strive Media is about more than teaching teens to produce television shows, magazines, and other forms of mass communications. While these dynamic point of contact programs have very similar objectives, they use specialized means to help youth develop self-confidence and master critical life skills for the ultimate betterment of their communities.

Finding and using a dynamic point of contact is a first step, but there's much more to it than that. To begin, the point of contact must be the right "hook" for a target audience. Four ingredients are needed to make this strategy work:

1. the vehicle or "hook" is both engaging and relevant to youth
   
2. programs are holistic in approach
   
3. activities are hands-on, integrated, and focused on real-life application
   
4. participants learn within a community

1. The Vehicle or "Hook" is both Engaging and Relevant

Young people are quickly bored by activities that don't "speak" to them and this boredom can lead to participation in unhealthy activities. A new study reported in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) (Vol. 90, No. 12) finds that point of contact programs which do find a relevant hook can be significant factors in deflecting a host of unhealthy behaviors, including smoking and drinking, sexual intercourse, violent behavior, and suicide. These programs "speak" to young people by providing activities that are fun and simultaneously challenging them to develop new skills and expand their aspirations.

Sports and Life founder Sara Diestro found she could get kids in the door by drawing on the immense popularity of soccer and other sports in Peru. "We began with sports and from there we began to include other activities," she said. For Peruvian youths, soccer is a relevant sport that excites them and keeps them engaged long enough to truly benefit developmentally.

The trick is to extend the challenge of sports to a life challenge. In one study, researchers sought to explain why some young people, despite terrible odds, were able to achieve significant life success, while many of their peers had difficulty overcoming challenging backgrounds.

In a 12-year study of 120 youth-based organizations in 34 U.S. cities, Milbrey McLaughlin and fellow researchers discovered that many of the successful young people had self-selected participation in programs that were, first of all, "structured, supportive, and challenging." Further, the most effective programs identified by the study included those that employed what researchers termed an "embedded-curriculum": a life-oriented approach that extended beyond the initial point of contact. ¹

"The teachers weren't just showing the kids how to dunk a basketball or act in a play," McLaughlin reported. "They were also coaching them on life skills . . . "

2. Using a Holistic Approach

While music, art, sports, and other "enrichment" activities offer unquestionable value to young people, they tend to focus only on teaching the skills necessary to perform the activity at hand when presented merely as recreational activities. Dynamic point of contact programs differ in that they use common enrichment activities to achieve further developmental aims.

At Strive Media, teens go beyond learning the hard skills relevant to media and communications. As author Laura Ax notes in this month's article on Strive, ". . . there are additional, yet equally important skills gained that are crucial to youth development. For example, leadership, camaraderie, project development, self-esteem, organization skills, decision-making, keeping commitments, working with others, acknowledging and respecting their peers, and self-confidence, to name but a few."

At Strive, the point of contact allows the program to reach young people on so many levels: "Communications is one of the fabrics that runs through everything in life." Strive provide opportunities for young people to engage in activities that help them develop emotionally, physically, intellectually, vocationally, and spiritually, a holistic approach that seeks to touch young people intensely on numerous levels.

3. Activities are Hands-On, Integrated, and Focused on Real-Life Application

Students learn-by-doing in all of these programs. Point of contact programs work hard to strike a balance between content and process. They emphasize the notion that "how we do our work us as important as what we do."

In traditional education environments, material is often compartmentalized, offering little acknowledgement of the connection between math, history or science, let alone how any of it connects to real-life. But in point of contact programs, subject matter is integrated through the point of contact and the student is integrated with the subject matter, thus closing the gap between "curriculum" and life. ² Focusing on real-life application makes learning meaningful for youth. They see an immediate connection between the skills taught and the usefulness therein.

The Food Trust in Philadelphia, PA uses hands-on, real-life, integrated learning to bring skill development to life. Middle-school students create, own, and operate agriculturally-focused microenterprises such as farm stands. To prepare for running their enterprise, they are required to write business plans. This employs math skills, language arts, basic business knowledge, and even some science to make a compelling case for the viability of their venture.

4. Participants Learn Within a Community

Point of contact programs often emphasize creating a sense of community among participants, as well as creating connections between students and the community at large.

MYSA, an organization in Mathare, one of the Nairobi's largest slums, uses photography is a point of contact to encourage cooperation, raise self-esteem, and promote physical and environmental health in the community. Through MYSA's Shootback program, youths photographs aspects of their lives that they regard as challenges, such as family, community, environment, health and personal issues.

The students learn photographic techniques and participate in weekly discussion sessions where they can address pressing community issues. They also use the Internet to exchange images and share experiences with other children around the world.

MYSA demonstrates how dynamic points of contact can be used to build community among a group of youths, while at the same time connecting them to the community at large. In the same way that MYSA contributes to strengthening its community and the youth within it, many dynamic point of contact programs are similarly equipped to spur these connections.

The hook that brings a youth to a program serves another incredibly important function: it connects the youth to him- or herself, creating some common ground, allowing for a starting point, and creating community. When young people who have connected through a dynamic point of contact reach the community beyond their classroom, they begin to feel a part of the solution to the issues challenging them and their environments. In this way, they begin to achieve self-reliance.

Building Better Communities with Dynamic Points of Contact

Many communities struggle to find the resources to support children's healthy development. Innovative programs like Strive Media and Sport and Life, which powerfully engage youth and make a lasting impact on their development, play an important role in building strong communities by providing far-reaching solutions that go to the root of problems.

Making change happen in society is a tough job – especially long-term change. It's success depends on how well-prepared community members are to play a role. Youth programs can make a lasting impact by using recreation and other points of contact to engage youths in situations that get them through the here-and-now, and then prepare them for the ever-after.

1. Journal of Research on Adolescence (Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 423459)
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2. http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/8/c016.html
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Recognizing that she could combine her commitment to community service and youth development with her life-long passion for food and cooking, Isack was motivated to start her own entrepreneurial venture. Brainfood was born of her concern that Washington, DC lacked many of the services and after-school activities necessary to help teenagers succeed and thrive.

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