Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts

Chapter 5: Building Youth Participation

114 5 Building Youth Participation betty farrell I enjoyed working with artists in residence; I hadn’t had that opportunity before. We got to work with two artists from Puerto Rico to create a public art project. They came in and we helped them come up with the idea and worked with them over time. As corny as it sounds, it makes you feel important as a teenager to work with a major institution’s public project. I had been to the Walker before—seen ‘Cherry Spoon.’ But, yeah; that’s about it. [Working with the Teen Arts Council] gave you a sense of responsibility at a time when you were starting to want that and you were not necessarily given that. A rewarding responsibility, rather than a dead-end job. —mike, a veteran walker art center teen arts council member (2005) Mosaic [Youth Theatre of Detroit] has taught me how to be me. Before Mosaic, I wouldn’t talk to many people and couldn’t sing in front of people without being nervous. Now That I Can Dance gave me a sense of confidence and a more positive attitude about what I can do in life. Another great thing about Mosaic is that we have so much fun and still get our work accomplished. It teaches us young artists how to manage our time, something we’ll definitely have to do when we reach college. —tangela, ensemble member of the mosaic singers, part of the mosaic youth theatre of detroit, quoted in “mosaic” One thing about teenagers is that this is a stage when we’re just realizing who we are and what our talents are. We will be realizing that for the rest of our lives—but you just want to be really 115 building youth participation creative and get out there and do what you want to do. A lot of places are looking for teens. And one thing that any class or workshop that is working with teens [has to do] is to be able to respect our creativity, like ISH did. . . . They’d say, ‘OK, here’s the move; go ahead and try it.’ And we just got out there and eventually we got comfortable. They just pushed us through their energy. . . . We learned the steps by watching and practicing and being supportive and using our creativity. —tegan, a teen participant in the ish institute, a break dancing/beat-boxing/spoken-word workshop led by a group of amsterdam artists, children’s theatre company (2005) “It’s modern, unpredictable, fun, eclectic.” If this describes your cultural organization, you may already have a sizable audience of youthful participants. For many, however, attracting teenagers or families with young children or even young adults in their twenties and early thirties presents a daunting challenge. Despite the fact that all adults once passed through these life stages themselves, the pace of social change in the early twenty-first century makes the world of contemporary youth feel like a foreign country. We live in an era and a culture in which youth is a potent economic and social force, in terms of young people’s capacity both to define fashion and to set the standards of taste culture. Marketers have identified preteens (ages nine to twelve) and teens (ages thirteen to seventeen) as a primary, trendsetting consumer group, and marketing to young people is now big business, as the many current books trumpeting this fact would suggest (see, for example, Siegel, Coffey, and Livingston 2004). Economist Juliet Schor argues that “kids and teens are now the epicenter of American consumer culture. They command the attention, creativity, and dollars of advertisers. Their tastes drive market trends. Their opinions shape brand strategies” (Schor 2004, 9). Although middle-aged baby boomers continue to dominate the consumer market through their sheer demographic size, as they have done since they gave definition to “youth culture” in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s not surprising that today’s youth should be another targeted audience of marketers. Since the early twentieth century, the prevailing ethos of commercial culture has been entertainment and spectacle, and the young are the most attentive audience for what’s new, entertaining , and stimulating. It is against this backdrop of the social, economic, and cultural power of young people that cultural organizations have also set their sights on increasing their numbers of youthful participants, 116 betty farrell including children, teens, and...