Our founding principles

Why is it so important to hear the words of these teenagers? Because we need dispatches from that border region that is adolescence…

The principles of this project were in part inspired by my work as a foreign correspondent in South America. The most important stories I did in my four years were dispatches from frontiers. These small jungle towns, mountainous backwaters, and arid desert outposts were largely off the radar of a media concerned with the goings-on in bustling city centers.

But it was only in these areas that one met the farmers turning to cultivating heroin poppies, the paramilitaries buying explosives from the Middle East, the radicals sowing seeds of dissent. It wasn’t in the city that you found out whether the civil, drug, and development struggles were being lost or won, it was here, on the edge, a population of canaries in society’s mineshaft. It would be too late to stop these waves, swelling at the edges, by the time they crashed at the center, bombs exploding and economies collapsing.

We all understand the value of foreign correspondents reporting from contested territories, reporting from borderlands on the frontline of drug trafficking, political power, economic exchange. These foreign correspondents live among these border dwellers, but apart enough to report home about what it means to be a member of this world. In our post 9/11, globalized world, it becomes increasingly important to understand the flow and flux of people, resources, and allegiance; we need these dispatches from transitional zones.

Adolescents in America live in such a liminal region, a temporal instead of geopolitical territory but with the same devastatingly high stakes for the future of our society.

Although each teen’s reality is different, when they step into this borderland, they generally have a small role in civil society and few resources of their own. When they leave, they will be able to vote, many will have incomes, and will be staring down a path they may regret having chosen for themselves.

The choices teens make in this region about recreation, the party they identify with, the products they will consume, will have long-term consequences for social services providers, politicians, marketers, and so on. Spiritual leaders, government officials, business people from all sectors cannot afford to go without direct reports of how teens are forming their codes of moral regulation and the loyalties that will drive their behavior as these things unfold. Only then do we have a chance to dam up potentially devastating tides and open the jets of productivity.

In backing this program, you are not merely donating, you are creating a cadre of correspondents from that contested territory that is adolescence. As various forces fight for control over the hearts and minds of future citizens, you provide a window into the swells and sorrows, catastrophes and crazes, promises and perils of tomorrow’s parents.

But the benefit is not just for society. As a foreign correspondent, I was always grateful that I could distance myself from the poverty and chaos of the world I lived in through my work, my reflection and analysis of the mechanisms at play.

Voice of Youth’s “teen correspondents” can distance themselves from the strife, the trafficking, the instability of their region, with the perspective they gain by having to explain the codes and the mechanisms to people outside that world. They can imagine a life beyond their own, they can project into a different future and imagine the consequences of their decisions, the responsibility they must take for the future.

I am not just speaking about my wishes and abstract hopes. I have seen the flashes of realization on the faces of adults as they have to reckon with first-hand accounts of gang life, popular culture, school budget crunches. I have watched the jaws drop as kids hear statistics about incarceration, substance abuse, economics, at home and abroad.

Please identify what portion you can provide of the budget we have carefully developed to sustain such an innovative and compelling project, aimed at complementing the incredible work people all over the county are already doing in the areas of education, mental health, housing and food provision, and violence prevention. The potential of all these efforts can only be maximized by bringing together teens from all different backgrounds to report on their passage into adulthood in prose and poetry, drama and dialogue. Without your participation, we will lose in these precious dispatches from the dynamic territory that is adolescence.