{"id":38225,"date":"2018-09-17T17:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T22:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=38225"},"modified":"2018-09-17T07:53:28","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T12:53:28","slug":"what-can-church-youth-leaders-learn-from-baltimore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2018\/09\/what-can-church-youth-leaders-learn-from-baltimore\/","title":{"rendered":"What Can Church Youth Leaders Learn from Baltimore?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For ten years, a Baltimore non-profit called Thread<\/a> has been working with the youth of that city. Thread\u2019s goal is to \u201cfoster students\u2019 academic advancement and personal growth into self-motivated, resilient, and responsible citizens.\u201d It does this by seeking out underperforming high school students and providing each one with a \u201cfamily of committed volunteers\u201d who coach them and connect them with other community resources. Thread is just one of hundreds of non-profits focused on youth services (Charity Navigator<\/a> lists 577 such organizations ), but Thread has gotten attention recently for its effectiveness in helping youth achieve positive outcomes. Eighty-eight percent of students who have gone through Thread\u2019s program have received a two-year or four-year college degree or certificate. Thread attributes its success to its comprehensive approach to helping students. Once a student is in the Thread program, the organization commits to supporting that student for ten years. During that ten-year span, Thread provides a \u201cfamily\u201d of up to four volunteers who commit to being available any time of the day or night, and on any day of the year, to support that student. \u201cResource teams\u201d staffed by experts back up that volunteer family to help meet specific needs as they arise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thread.org<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While this structure of families and resource teams is important to Thread\u2019s success so far, the real key seems to be the idea of \u201ctouchpoints.\u201d Thread emphasizes the need for volunteers and staff to have frequent touchpoints with each student. Thread has demonstrated this emphasis on touchpoints by developing a custom app called Tapestry that allows volunteers and staff to log touchpoints with students. Tapestry will send out an alert if it\u2019s been a while since a student had a touchpoint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This set of structures and tools seems to work. Thread is growing, and it has ambitious goals. Within the next four years, it aims to have nearly 5% of Baltimore\u2019s adult population working with the organization to serve its youth in some way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading about the work that Thread is doing, I can\u2019t help but think about our church\u2019s own youth and ministering programs. With the transition from home- and visiting-teaching to ministering, Church leaders have said that one of the aims of this change is to allow bishoprics to focus more on helping the youth in their wards. And the Church has long emphasized that all of its programs are intended to support individual families. In that way, I see parallels between the volunteer \u201cfamilies\u201d of Thread and the programs run by each ward. Looking at it from an individual youth member\u2019s perspective, he or she is assigned leaders, ministering brothers and sisters, a bishop, and perhaps a ministering companion. Ideally, all of these adult members are supported by Church resources and, in some cases, expert help. These adult members each do their part to achieve the goal of helping the youth of their ward become more committed and fully formed disciples of Christ, who are in turn able to help others along the gospel path. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at Thread\u2019s Tapestry app, I think about how amazing it would be if a bishop or a Young Women\u2019s president could look at a list of the youth in the ward and see when each had last been contacted, who had made that contact, and what they had done. I imagine the Church\u2019s intrepid software developers could juice up LDS Tools to look something like Thread\u2019s Tapestry app, but I can just as easily imagine all the privacy concerns such a change might cause. Beyond that, implementing such a solution on a global scale for millions of youth and their leaders may be more trouble than it\u2019s worth. My larger point is that those leaders who have accepted responsibility for shepherding youth through their crucial transition years should strive for as much awareness of the true situation for each young member as they can get. They should try to recreate the Tapestry app in their heads as they conduct interviews, sit in on Sunday classes, receive reports, and visit homes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Church and its youth program are not just another flavor of youth-focused non-profit. Thread wants to get kids through college. The Church wants to help kids on the path to eternal life. That said, it may sometimes be helpful to look at what\u2019s working in the wider world, and to see whether we can borrow a few strategies. So what do you think? Have you seen tools and methods like those used by Thread employed in your ward?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For ten years, a Baltimore non-profit called Thread has been working with the youth of that city. Thread\u2019s goal is to \u201cfoster students\u2019 academic advancement and personal growth into self-motivated, resilient, and responsible citizens.\u201d It does this by seeking out underperforming high school students and providing each one with a \u201cfamily of committed volunteers\u201d who coach them and connect them with other community resources. Thread is just one of hundreds of non-profits focused on youth services (Charity Navigator lists 577 such organizations ), but Thread has gotten attention recently for its effectiveness in helping youth achieve positive outcomes. Eighty-eight percent of students who have gone through Thread\u2019s program have received a two-year or four-year college degree or certificate. Thread attributes its success to its comprehensive approach to helping students. Once a student is in the Thread program, the organization commits to supporting that student for ten years. During that ten-year span, Thread provides a \u201cfamily\u201d of up to four volunteers who commit to being available any time of the day or night, and on any day of the year, to support that student. \u201cResource teams\u201d staffed by experts back up that volunteer family to help meet specific needs as they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10398,"featured_media":38226,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1058],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guest-bloggers"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/thread_model-15-150x150.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38225"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38228,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38225\/revisions\/38228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}