SPRING 2007

You can hear the smile in her voice as Mary Arnold, an Associate Professor in the 4-H Youth Development program at the Oregon State University, describes the Oregon Coast.

You might come west through the mountains, she says, and when you get over the ridges, you’d be staring straight down to the ocean, and it’s the most beautiful sight you might ever see -- miles of coastline, breakers crashing right along highway 101. It won’t take you long to get to the coast; the mountains come down quickly to the sea here, and the effect is stunning.

The sun can turn rock to gold on the right kind of afternoon, and it will also light up the windows of the few stores you’d start to see as you head into town. There aren’t many, some trinket shops, maybe one that sells kites to the folks from away who come to the ocean for a day in the wind. You might see a small grocery store, and you’d notice the lack of the shiny, tidiness common to updated supermarkets.

Oregon 4-H Coastal Futures Initiative - Youth-adult team from Coos County

A little further things might start to change, at the edge of the town, resort hotels, a Starbucks, a golf course. If you look up now to the sides of the mountain range, you’d see large, well-appointed homes, huge windows catching the afternoon light. But where you are now, in the heart of the town, the homes are modest, some with the cracking paint and broken wood of a place where money is tight. These are small towns, and the logging and fisheries that used to sustain them are pretty much gone. Retirees and tourists have discovered them, and that keeps a meager retail and recreational income stream flowing, but the folks who have raised their families, retired from good jobs in other places and moved here, or those who come for a day to fly a kite in the coastal wind, don’t bring substantial employment opportunities. And just as profoundly, they don’t bring a natural inclination to engage with the families struggling to make a healthy community here in the fold of the Oregon Coast.

On this part of the Oregon Coast, some retirees number almost twice as many as those under 18, and the unemployment rates are high, almost 9 percent in some areas. The median household income is well below the national average, and the number living below the poverty line is above.

This is the palate on which the Oregon 4-H Coastal Futures initiative intends to paint a new picture. The artists are youth and adults who live here, their paint and brushes are the tools of community organizing and participant social research. Heather Wiley is one of them, a lifelong 4-Her who grew up on her family’s farm a few miles outside of town in Coos County. But Coastal Futures has caught her attention in a different way, offering her new skills in leadership and community organizing.

Heather, her mother and sister attended a two-day training session on the 4-H Coastal Futures program last year. They listened as Mary Arnold and her colleagues described the possibilities of youth-adult partnerships, of community forums, and the ways young people could serve as social researchers, gathering the kinds of information that could inform sustainable community change. Now Heather, having organized a community forum, is part of a group of youth and adults who are creating an evening social gathering-- a start, she says. And it’s clear Heather sees an opportunity where there hasn’t been one, the potential to engage her community in creating a different future.

The towns are separated by miles and miles here, miles of empty coast line, or dotted with farms like the one where Heather’s family lives. Up the coast, in a town as isolated as Heather’s farm, another group of young people, organized by a high school teacher with technical assistance and support of Mary Arnold and her colleagues at the Oregon State University Extension Service, work to hone their skills as they engage in one of the key components of Coastal Futures, intensive training in organizing skills and participatory social research. Young people conduct mock community forums, record the ideas and experiences people bring to the forum and learn skills such as group facilitation and public speaking.

Mary Arnold describes one small moment in a mock forum where a young woman who had not met anyone’s eyes was finally encouraged to stand up and voice her thoughts. She stood with an adult trainer at first, limp in her lack of confidence that she could offer anything to the process. But as she began to try, encouraged by her adult partner in the role, and by her peers, a smile crept onto her face. Before long at all, her body was animated too, as she began to understand her capacity to do the task at hand, and the potential impact her contribution could make.

This scene illustrates the results of this work, in terms of leadership for youth development. In before and after self-reports, young people indicate that the Coastal Futures training events more than double, in most cases, their knowledge in areas like facilitation, skills for meeting and action planning and community meetings.

They also report an increase in knowledge of youth-adult partnerships, and this is a key ingredient. Heather Wiley says that it’s new for her to be invited, even expected, to contribute her ideas, opinions and experiences in the way that Coastal Futures asks of her. In the past, she says, an adult would plan the activity, set the agenda, and she would be invited to participate. But in this program, for the first time, she sets the agenda, she plans the forum, gathers the information and partners with other youth and adults to make meaning of it and translate it to action.

This is, of course, one of many places where the Innovation Center and 4-H Coastal Futures find their common ground. When Mary Arnold met Wendy Wheeler and Hartley Hobson Wensing, she knew she had found strong allies in her work. She counts on the concepts and ideas in the Innovation Center’s Learning and Leading and Youth Adult Partnerships tool kits to strengthen her understanding of youth civic engagement and youth-adult partnership. And the Eight Pathways to Youth Engagement model identified by the Kellogg Foundation and documented by the Innovation Center is a crucial ingredient of the Coastal Futures design. Mary and her colleagues, including Heather Wiley and other young people up and down the coast, would like to expand the scope of their work, bringing community organizing and participatory research skills to young people nationally, bringing them together to learn to analyze the data they gather at community forums, and offering the insights of marketing professionals to translate the data to public campaigns and community action.

This represents an opportunity for partnership, of course, the kind that lights up and brings to scale small initiatives all over the US and in other parts of the world. And it’s easy to see how Coastal Futures might be the seed of a new coming together of ideas, ideas brought to scale through the combined efforts of young people and adults fully engaged with each other in their determination to effect community change.

In the meantime, though, there is a different kind of light on the Oregon Coast. Options for young people after high school here are limited; some leave for college and do not return, some participate in a family business, or find other ways to eek out a living in the struggling economies of these communities. But through Coastal Futures, the potential for that to change is growing. Heather Wiley, for one, intends to stick around for a year or so after she graduates. She’s pretty sure she can make a difference, and she wants to learn how. Coastal Futures is her doorway to that dream.

For more information on the 4-H Coastal Futures Project, and the condition of rural communities along the Oregon shore, click here.

The 4-H Coastal Futures Project is part of the 4-H Youth Development Education and Oregon Sea Grant programs of the Oregon State University Extension Service. The project is funded in part through the Engaging Youth – Serving Communities program, supported by the Cooperative States Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under agreement No. 2005-45201-03332.