The prime target audience for the two hour documentary Boys to Men? is teens, 7th-12th grade. If I were to identify one ideal message that youngsters, particularly young men, would receive from viewing the completed program it is this: you are not alone in your struggles in life. If there were one overarching action I would hope youngsters would take based on this message it is this: seek and find a mentor. It's not enough for us to know how much teens need mentoring and guidance; we need to find ways to empower them to seek mentors for themselves. Ideally, Boys to Men? will provide this vehicle.
These are the ideas I have now, at this point in time. The "best use" plan for the film may look differently to the young people who, under my direction, are going to design and implement its use among Newark teens.
The Newark Outreach for the film Boys to Men? will be accomplished in three distinct phases. The first phase will take place in mid-summer. The Youth Leadership Council of Newark, funded by Lucent Corp. and administered by the North Ward Association, will spend one week reviewing the program, designing and writing a peer-based facilitation curriculum, and printing 100 copies. I will work in conjunction with them during that process. Following these meetings, the 95 minute film will be re-edited into three roughly 30 minute segments, more suitable for viewing in educational settings.
Phase II will take place on a Saturday in the following early Fall at the Newark Museum auditorium. One hundred teens from around Newark, representing one hundred separate educational and community institutions, will convene for a day-long facilitation seminar and training. They will review the documentary's three segments. They will then be trained by their Youth Leadership peers in how best to facilitate the curriculum in their own separate institutions. Each teen "ambassador" will leave the seminar with the printed curriculum, VHS copies of the program, and the knowledge of how to take the film's messages to their peers.
Phase III will take place over the remainder of the Fall. Covering all the Newark area public middle and high schools, all the parochial, private and charter schools, and many community groups providing youth and family services, the 100 ambassadors will implement the curriculum in their "home" institutions. (Some youngsters who were former residents of Newark but who presently reside in neighboring communities like Irvington, East Orange, and Jersey City will also be included.) Each teen will partner with an adult in his or her respective institution to design and implement a plan that best suits their site. In some locales that might mean a one-time school assembly. In some community groups it might mean multiple small "seminars" of 6-10 people. However, in most places, ideally, it will mean repeated presentations/facilitations with multiple classroom-size groups.
It is estimated that over 9,000 of Newark area teens will be reached as "end-users." Just as importantly, the program will empower the Youth Leadership Council and the 100 teen facilitators; by giving them meaningful responsibilities, the outreach program will reward them with recognition and compensation. Effectively, these teen leaders will model the mentorship they'll be asking each teen viewer to seek in her or his life. It's also worth noting that the printed curriculum guides and VHS tapes will remain with each institution so that subsequent waves of Newark teens will benefit from the same program by the thousands.
Along with myself, three different not-for-profit community groups in Newark will oversee the process: Kids Corporation, Do Something, and The READY Foundation. Each group will provide roughly 33 ambassadors.
Kids Corporation will arrange for ambassadors from youth and community based organizations which provide services to kids through the 8th grade. Do Something will provide ambassadors from all the public middle and high schools. And The READY Foundation will provide ambassadors from the private, charter, and parochial schools in and around Newark.
Utilizing a program already in existence, the ambassadors from Do Something will work in conjunction with the "Coaches" in their respective schools to design their site-specific implementation plan. The other teens from Kids Corp. and READY will do the same - working with adults who already function as their on-site contacts and mentors. That way, each teen will work out an implementation plan that meets the approval of the 100 "home" institutions' administrators.
In addition, renowned Rutgers-Newark Social Psychology Professors will conduct two related research studies of the film's effectiveness. One, a written evaluation of pre-post design, will measure one hundred students'attitudes related to the issues of masculinity and mentoring, seeking especially to denote any behavioral changes in a student's willingness to seek mentoring. The Professors will also attend the training and observationally study volunteers' emerging reactions: to the film during viewing, to the questions they raise afterwards, to their willingness to enter into conversation regarding the issues raised by the film, and to their direct referencing of the film in these conversations (e.g., references to characters and scenes as exemplars of the challenges of adolescence and the need for mentoring). Finally, the Professors will survey a subsample of the student participants, collecting information on demographics, leadership background, present mentoring relationships, and predisposition for volunteering.
Finally, in the following Spring, a brief final report will be prepared that will summarize the outreach program's effectiveness, including the results of the Rutgers-Newark Professors studies, but also detailing the numbers and specifics: what institutions were reached by the teen facilitators, how many of their peers were reached, and what some of the anecdotal observations and feedback from facilitators were.
Assuming the film's primary message and desired action remain as above, it will be each teen facilitator's job to not only encourage youngsters to seek out their own mentors, but to make specific information and resources available to their peers that will make that action possible. When many of Newark's 9,000 teens who view the film seek out guidance and mentoring from adults, the film can truly be considered successful and the outreach complete.
