Youth issues discussed at meeting

Local Bloomington youth leaders, IU students and staff members met with a common goal Thursday.\nIn a dialogue sponsored by Community Outreach and Partnerships in Service-Learning, 23 people gathered at the Monroe County Public Library to talk about youth issues in Bloomington. The focus centered on the Crestmont neighborhood community, located on the west side of Bloomington.\nA $3,000 grant for the project has been provided by the Indiana Campus Compact.\nCatherine Gray, assistant director of Community Outreach said the goal of the dialogue was to "try to develop partnerships with community agencies who would benefit from working with students."\nRepresentatives from various local and school related organizations including the United Way, the Girls and Boys Club, Collins Living-Learning Center, Teen Council and more attended the meeting.\nDirector of Community Outreach JoAnne Campbell stressed the importance of including a variety of groups in her opening remarks, defining a dialogue as "the art of thinking together."\n"We want to get people thinking even bigger about how we can use IU as a resource in the community," said Campbell.\nGroup members discussed the feelings of community they had as children to facilitate discussion about the positive and negative youth programs in the Bloomington area. They discussed community ties often coming from geographic connection to the area or personal connections with fellow citizens, noting that these relationships are often created in school. Members mentioned that those from smaller communities typically felt closer ties than those from bigger cities..\nA representative from the Office of Multicultural Affairs noted that race can often make children feel disenfranchised from the community. Minority children suffer from different treatment and sometimes feel different from the rest of their peers.\nSocioeconomic status and sexual orientation were other dividing factors discussed.\nAmy Wolverton, a graduate student, focused her comments on student involvement. She said she thought more IU students would get involved in the community if the opportunities were offered to them.\n"Right now, we have to seek out these opportunities on our own," she said.\nThe Boys and Girls Club in the Crestmont neighborhood was a major focus for the group. The facility is too small to handle the number of kids in the area. The club was recently granted money for new computers, but because of space limitations, could only put them in the upstairs of the small duplex. The computers are not accessible to the club's children with disabilities.\nThe club is also bogged down with a transportation problem. Lack of transportation to take kids to local parks, basketball leagues or other recreational activities limits what the club can provide.\nAnother group member argued that children should not have to leave their community to participate in outdoor organized events, creating another issue for the group to tackle.\nCampbell encouraged the group to bring students with them to the next meeting Jan, 11. "It needs to be an organic process," she said, encouraging all of the groups represented to work together.\nGraduate student Alyson Mease said she was impressed with the meeting. "I liked that action ideas were proposed and we used our own experiences," she said.\nWolverton agreed and added that the groups goal should be "seeing kids as resources and not as problems"