Purpose & Project Summary

Project Title: "2008 Diverse Youth-Adult Partnerships in Rural Nebraska"

Funding Source: USDA Rural Youth Development, CSREES, National 4-H Council

Overall Project Goals:

1. Rural Nebraska children and youth have the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors necessary to live productive, contributing, and fulfilling lives.

2. Resources and tools are available in an environment where Nebraska youth and adults can work together as partners, making decisions to increase economic opportunities and improved quality of life in their rural communities.

Overall Project Objectives:

1. Youth are gaining the life skills and experience needed to emerge as effective leaders and contributing members in their rural communities, working together as a core group of 15-20 youth leaders and 5-10 adult leaders in each community.

2. Youth and adults are beginning to have more positive attitudes, strengthening relationships between each other and sharing the roles of community decision-making.

3. Diverse youth and adults are improving their abilities to collaborate with other diverse community members to understand and appreciate differences, with an emphasis on Hispanic & Tribal communities. Using these differences as strengths, they are coming together to identify local issues and implement strategies for rural community improvement.

4. Youth and adults are working together to facilitate community forums, meetings and educational opportunities in order to implement action plans that will provide opportunities for involvement of all youth and families in rural communities so they can experience positive growth and development in their community.

"2008 Diverse Youth-Adult Partnerships In Rural Nebraska" emphasizes the following issues that affect the lives of rural youth. Many Nebraska rural youth:

• Experience less community interconnection of people due to long commute times of parents to work and children to school, especially more unsupervised time out of school.
• Are impacted by diverse populations, especially Hispanic, moving into rural communities. Hispanic and Tribal youth are also impacted when they are introduced to predominantly white, rural communities.
• Have fewer physical locations in which to interact with peers and adults.
• Live in cultures stereotyped by prejudice, ethnocentricity and intolerance to nonconforming ideas that could lead to violence.
• Tend not to return to communities due to a lack of a sense of belonging and connection to their culture and the community.

"2008 Diverse Youth-Adult Partnerships In Rural Nebraska" emphasizes the following activities:

• Provide youth-adult partnership training for a “core group” of youth and adults.
• This core group works with community members to identify issues that affect youth, through community meetings/forums. These issues are then prioritized.
• The core group selects 1-3 top issues and develop a plan of activities to address the issue(s).
• All community youth and families are be invited to participate in project activities planned by the core group.
• The core group continues to develop and evaluate activities related to community involvement and outcomes that happen as result of the activities.
• The core group presents a report of their project activities to the local unit of community government and other local community organizations.