“Youth Crew: Empowering Youth and Fostering Community Engagement in Barton County, Kansas”

[00:00:05] Jake White: Happy Monday. Welcome back to another episode of Party Talk where we empower leaders in youth drug prevention. Today, I’m talking with the “Youth Crew”. Now from Barton County in Kansas, this team is doing incredible work. They gather students, they’re doing prevention. And they’re really empowering the students to take control of the movement, and really make a difference in their community. And they make it fun, which I love. So please enjoy this episode of the Party Talk podcast. Y’all are in the Juvenile Justice Department and you’re also doing prevention. So you have both of those lens to look through. And you have a thriving, basically a youth prevention club called the “Youth Crew”. Can y’all introduce to the Party Talk podcast audience, what is “Youth Crew” and what y’all are doing and brag it up, y’all are doing great stuff. So tell us what’s going well, what challenges y’all have had?

[00:01:04] Tyler Morton: We just celebrated two years actually. So that was a huge milestone. We did a big celebration with the kids and with the parents and our stakeholders back in the early part of June. So this started off, Marissa and a few others want to get out there. This is community based. So that makes us a little more unique compared to some of the other people you talk to. It seems like more school based operations. So this is definitely community based. Mercer being the director of Juvenile Services, and that’s being housed here in Juvenile Services. So started in June of 2021. And I believe there was a group of about 12 to 15. And the idea just kind of came where they said, “We wanted to do something for the community and what can we look at doing?” So one of the really unique features and cool features about Great Bend, Kansas, we don’t have a lot, but we do have a free zoo in the middle of one of our parks here. So for any of those of you that are looking for travel plans to read in Kansas, we got something for you. Anyways, they reached out, Marissa reached out to the people who run the zoo and said, “Can we come and pick up trash and just help for the day? And that was kind of what sparked this whole this whole thing. So she could probably speak more on the on the first couple months about that. But there were some meetings in play, a lot of it was just kind of laying the groundwork for what did the kids want to do, really propelling the youth led action, getting their ideas on paper, getting their ideas out into the community. So we got grant funded at October of 2021. So four months later, and then I came on basically March 1st of 2022. And that’s when we started, we at that time, we had a meeting in Great Bend. And this is kind of our main hub. As far as the county is concerned, this is where the majority of our population is. But we do have other smaller towns in each direction around us. So we set a goal to do some recruitment last year, we do have some programs within the schools like our “All Stars-Program”, that’s where the prevention efforts start. So they that’s for sixth graders in Barton County in our grant serve 6 to 12. So that was already going and we became a bigger piece of that, which was nice. And then the goal was to expand because we wanted to increase those protective factors, lower the risk factors do more with the barriers for transportation, a lot of our kids can drive and things all  now we want to make it easier on our families as well. So we went from having meetings in one town to having meetings, three different communities now. We do those pretty much monthly at this point. So we are constantly meeting with the kids, keeping them engaged. And then just community collaboration, building up our team of stakeholders to give us ideas and thoughts and feedback, working within the school to talk to them about their needs and how we can help them. Obviously getting some information working throughout Juvenile Services. We see kids that come through here and we get feedback quite a bit. And that’s been very helpful as well from that side of things.

[00:04:20] Jake White: So I’m curious. And Marissa, you might know more about this, since you’re there longer than Tyler. But in the beginning, when you had those first 12 students, join the “Youth Crew”. How did you find these students? And what was the aim to get them together for? How’d you pull that up?

[00:04:40] Marissa Woodmansee: That’s a great question. Because even how we got kids to come and we asked them that, how did you hear about us what worked, what didn’t work and always that we are always using that framework as far as we’re working with the kid. So when we were trying to decide what to do to launch. We landed on that 1st June, Wednesday. And we actually used kids from Juvenile Services that needed to do community service work for their diversion programs all around. So we utilize that accessible resource, if you will, to go to our library, their local coffee shops, or local candy shops or courthouse where our opposite located, it’s really in the center of the downtown area. And so it’s easy to grab a kiddo and go disperse flyers and whatnot. And so essentially, that’s what we did. And my goal which is a gaming place for kids, we hit those areas and hit the quick shop, just really tried to saturate where we thought kids would go with our fliers. So it was one of those things I always hope come on one kid, just one kid and to get 12, it is great. And it really was a mix of in that sixth grade area to then six that were middle school and high school. So we divided the kids up, and we just kind of had that conversation as what do you want for your community? What do you want to do? What do you want to see? And try to get them invested in their community at a higher level? So the importance of even telling you about the flyer saturation is because one of our kids that is a member now and an outstanding member, she found our flyer at the candy shop. So she saw it, and she was like, “I’ll go try it.” So I think it just goes to show that you just got to try everything and, and even though we try with our social media and presence, and it sometimes seems again that it’s just not reaching, but we got to keep trying anyway, because we will reach them when they’re ready to hear the message.

[00:06:53] Jake White: So it sounds like flyers was a big part of it. And did I do this correctly. So you had students from the Juvenile Justice Program, they could help you flyer everybody around town, and all local businesses, that’s fantastic. You’re getting them involved too and they’re seeing what you’re doing. And then that helps you bring together the 12 students that were probably there from like the school district, and they’re living in town and stuff. And I’m also curious for what the pitch was or what was on the flyer that was enticing? You mentioned make a difference in your community. There’s a youth group happening. Do you remember?

[00:07:33] Marissa Woodmansee: Let me look to see that I know of it. I can see now.

[00:07:37] Jake White: That’s awesome. She’s like, I might have a copy. The things that I’ve seen is, social media can be effective. But if you’re already in with the school’s having announcements, showing up at lunch, having a speaker come in to pitch the idea and get them excited about it. So the fact that y’all pull this off with flyers, is actually pretty impressive. It’s something that I would probably say, “Oh no, that’s not gonna work.” So the fact that y’all got 12, I am so oppressed.

[00:08:12] Marissa Woodmansee: I don’t have it, Jake. But if I find it, I’ll send it to you.

[00:08:17] Jake White: That’s great. We can post it on the blog if you couldn’t find it, and check that out. But that’s incredible. So now you mentioned and I actually saw an article, you have a lot of media coverage out there when I Google “Youth Crew”, Barton County. So it shows how active you are. You mentioned that the transportation was an issue. And I think that’s the case for a lot of rural communities, especially the ones that I’ve worked with. So you’ve done a good job on going to the communities. Where are you meeting, and when are you meeting?

[00:08:56] Tyler Morton: Right now we have three meetings. We meet in Great Bend, like I mentioned, it’s kind of the main hub for Barton County. And then we also meet in Hoisington, which is just north of here about 10 miles and then we meet in Ellenwood, which is back to the east about 10 miles and so the communities are not close enough to where the kids can get to easily. Now we do have other desert there. And we do have we do have some kids that like they’re there. Even for myself, I live in Hoisington. But I work in grey bin, and that’s a little bit more common. I think that would set out for the Ellenwood kids and Hoisington for that matter. So right now we’re meeting for one hours what we landed on for meeting times. We have been meeting on we had been on Sundays throughout the month that typically happens throughout the school season, mostly because we run into athletics and other pro social events, church, different things that the kids are doing. And so we try to do that on Sunday afternoon, Sunday students to the kind of day where families are more together, they go to church and things like that. And then in the afternoon, they have a little bit more free time. And then during the summer, we moved to Wednesdays. So we’ve been on Wednesday since May. And the reason we do that is because we have families that then go on vacation, and we got a lot, especially this time of year, it seems July and August is kind of when our attendance starts to fall a little bit. And we just want to be respectful of our families, again, talking about those risks and protective factors. That’s been something we’ve been focusing on a lot over the training, but especially in these last couple of weeks or so. And I just did some more training with that recently, and just encouraging the kids that, we want you to be a part of this. But we understand it’s one of 100 things you’ve got going on right now talking to parents saying, we want your kids to be a part of this, but we want it to be feasible for your families as well. We did do a survey when we had our end of year celebration, just to get good feedback from all the families and ask them, is this working? Do you guys find this working? Pretty much everybody across the board said, we’d like to schedule we’d like the consistency of meetings. That was one of the things first, when I first talked about when I jumped on, as I said, “I had done some youth programs within our church, from where we came from before, and things like that.” And I said to me, the engagement is the biggest piece of it and especially with having three communities now. It’s hard, even on leadership team, it’s hard for us to meet three out of four Sundays a month. But we do that because we know that if the kids are going to invest, the families are going to invest, we have to be willing to do that that personal investment as well. Because if you only have beans every couple of weeks, and you have three communities, there may be a chance you won’t see a group for three months at a time minus maybe some events or whatever you got going on.

“Meeting Locations and Changing Perceptions”

[00:11:49] Jake White: You’d kind of lose momentum, if you do have that much time in between each meeting. It would make sense that y’all are really, really investing. Like you said, I’m curious to like what locations? Are you meeting at a coffee shop? Are you meeting at school? Where are you actually setting up and having the students go when you’ll have these meetings?

[00:12:09] Tyler Morton: So here it works out really well. We have a really nice Conference Room here at Juvenile Services. So we meet here, that’s actually where we just had our meeting yesterday. And then as far as great Ben is concerned, that’s pretty much where we met this whole time. And it’s actually a really cool, maybe Marissa agrees with this, I think we’ve talked about this before, we are also working on changing the perception of Juvenile Services, there’s just kind of this moniker about what happened. It’s not us cuff and stuff kind of deal or anything like that. We really want to be more to the community than just what people typically associate Juvenile Services with. So having meetings here is a big piece of that, because they didn’t get to come in and see the building, they meet some of the other staff members and things like that. And it just opens that more for conversation. And for people to go, they’re out there really trying to help as a unit. And it’s not just what you would normally associate that with. So that’s the big part for Great Bend. And Hoisington, we’ve had a couple different locations, we started off at the local library. And they had a small meeting space in the back. That was a more of a conference setup for about 10 people. So we quickly outgrew that. And now we’ve gotten a donation from the activity center there. They have a craft room that could sit probably, I would say, 40-ish people on a good day if they wanted to. We have 15 kids regularly that come I would say. So the activity center again in Hoisington specifically, that’s pretty much where the youth hang out if they’re not at school. That’s where the basketball courts are the weights all that stuff. So small town, that’s a great location for them to get to and it’s pretty accessible to most of the community. And then in Ellenwood, we started meeting at a coffee shop, they were nice enough to donate space to us. The setup was a little bit different because the rooms a little bit longer. So you can meet there, but it’s just a little more challenging. And they were gracious. I think we met there for four or five months. But they are also a business and they’re open to public. So during the winter months, they were having Christmas parties there. They also host baby showers and different things because that’s like the only real community space that’s in that area. So our stuff started kind of conflicting with them a little bit. And so then we just moved down the street to what’s called the wolf hotel in Ellenwood. And that’s a really cool place. It’s a historic building. They do some like community luncheons and stuff there on I believe Sundays after church but it’s historic. I think there’s some like underground tunnels and stuff. I would say the main historic building of Ellenwood and right there on Main Street. So again, it’s easy access for the kids and for the parents, so all been kind enough to donate space to us.

“Engaging Middle School Students in Prevention”

[00:15:04] Marissa Woodmansee: And that is also that opportunity then that our kid, we’re going to those cities anyway, if they want to join, they can ride along. Some of them are getting old enough now that they can drive themselves. But even like Tyler said, the other thing with the Ellenwood, the wolf hotel is, it does have that era of mystery with in the middle of the room, there’s the man that had died, his story and his quote and the kids are all like, “It’s exciting for them, and they’re just like, where are we? What are we just up into?” So for them to be able to have that experience. So it is an evolving a work in progress, and continuing to try to meet the key kids at their needs. Like Tyler said, we’re continuing the training of risk and protective factors. And to even go a little bit further with that. It’s just how important the relationships are to the kids. And even from the Juvenile Service lens, and that Justice lens is, we know not everybody’s doing it substance misuse, we know that the data tells us, but we also know that the data tells us that there is an increased risk as they progress into their high school years. So being able to provide that relational opportunity for them at sixth grade and into those formative years of middle school, I feel it’s going to have a more profound impact. So I’m back to us in a few years and see where we’re at.

[00:16:41] Jake White: I had someone we did a community, that’s actually sounds similar to yours. There was three rural communities, we picked a spot in the middle, a high school, invited all three middle schools there, did an assembly program, train some student leaders, and then they were going to throw these fun, positive, sober events for their friends. And so the way we set it up is we had like a shark tank competition, so they got to pitch their ideas, they would win money. And then we taught them how to get sponsors in the community. So all this wrapped up. And the first school is in Wild Rose, Wisconsin, they had their first party, almost 100 students showing up to their event had a great time. And then, what was funny is I was bragging on that, “Hey, check it out.” How encouraging is it that these middle school students have a lens, where when we interviewed them, they’re appreciating sobriety? They’re helping redefine sobriety. So it’s something positive, it’s something fun, energetic, and healthy. And their friends are actually getting into it, that’s a win. And someone commented, “Middle schoolers can’t drink anyway.” And I’m like, “Oh please, tell this to the 1000s of students who are getting in trouble with alcohol and vaping and THC.” Like, we understand that, but prevention starts before that decision, and I love hearing you talk about that as if we start young, then we can help build that resilience, those refusal skills, these emotions strong so that they can bypass that stuff and say, “Hey, I don’t need it, or I found without it. They have real coping skills.” So I just had to share that this is something that not everybody gets. Parents don’t get it. Sometimes community members don’t get it sometimes. But the longer we can have them wait on that decision, the better. I’m curious for your perspective. Do you have any goals here in the next couple of years that are exciting to you on? And one specific one I’m curious about. And then to just tell me about any of them? How do you see the three chapters of “Youth Crew” working together? Or are they kind of separate entities? You get them together for trainings, or do you have any goals for that? And then just in general, “What are y’all looking to do in the near future?” That gets all excited.

[00:19:15] Tyler Morton: So kind of answer your first question about the communities because I think that’s probably a very important part of this. So the kids actually came up with a youth group pledge. And it’s basically their commitment to each other. It’s a peer to peer commitment that they stated. So they made some, some rules and some different things strict stay drug and alcohol free, attend meetings, and attend events, things like that. So that’s really cool because it gives them something to kind of hold each other too which is awesome and we’re reworking that a little bit right now. Just because we’ve gone through a year with it. It’s just one over a year old. So we’ve learned what’s working, what’s not working. So that’s been awesome to review with them recently. But that also plays into the events and plays into basically their buy in for anything. It says that, when you’re at school and in your community and you’re outside of us crew, are you being a good steward of what you’ve learned so far so far. And as far as events and stuff are concerned, so the kids have the opportunity to go to the other towns, if they want to, they can either we ask that they try to attend the meetings in their own town as much as possible. But if they want to go, the other communities are more than welcome to and we’ve had a really good shift at that. We’ve had parents that have dropped kids off in the other community so that that’s actually worked out pretty well. Given all the circumstances, we recently came up with the new travel waiver. So now that we can help move kids back and forth a little bit if we need to, we are still limited to the size of transportation. But even things like this Catholic conference we’re going to in July, Marissa was kind enough and helped us secure a 15 passenger van. So we’ll go rent that. And we’ll take a group we took one student last year this year, we’re taking six. When we did the Wildling conference two weeks ago, we did eight kids last year, this year, we did 16 and we had three vehicles lined with kids ready to roll. So we kind of joke about that there was a slide at our presentation where I made a joke about the travel waiver being for planes, trains, and automobiles, we have one of our students that’s really open will secure an RV in the near future. So anything like that, of course, sponsorships and whatnot. So we always encourage the kids to go to other communities. Same thing with events too. We have events and all we’ve done events, both in Great Bend and Hoisington. We have a trash pickup day that’s coming up in August where we’ll do that and Ellenwood too. But for instance, we collaborated with zero reasons why suicide prevention. Back in May, they did a Color Run. And so I think Marissa was out there are other youth leadership. Caitlin Sigler with the health department, she was out there as well. And I think they had 13 or 14 Kids, if I remember correctly, that went out from all the communities. And so we always tell the kids, “Look, don’t let transportation be a hindrance, don’t let ‘X’, ‘Y’, ‘Z’ be hindrance, let us know. And we’ll do our best to get you involved. Because we don’t want to turn kids away. We don’t want to discourage them from participating, whatever we can do to try to help them with that as to the best of our abilities.” So as far as participation, things like that, that’s what we try to aim for.

[00:22:40] Jake White: That’s so good. And I will see you two at Cadca, because I’ll be presenting to the Youth Track.

[00:22:47] Tyler Morton: Oh, perfect.

[00:22:48] Jake White: It’s called “Ignite Your Influence”. So we’ll be talking about how to speak to adults in your city, how to speak to the students, your peers, influence them to be a positive role model. And just like some of the things that I used when I started my student movement in college, I’m going to be teaching to them, so that they can use it on your campuses.

“Empowering Youth and Public Speaking”

[00:23:09] Tyler Morton: Perfect. We’ll be our kids are going down there. I’ll be down there. And then we have Holly Boyer, who is another one. She’s a parent of one of our kids. She also does zero reasons why she’ll be going down there with me chaperoning. And we’ll have six kids with us. And I think we’re doing the key essentials this year because five of the six are first timers. But if we get chance to your presentation stuff, that’d be awesome. We’ve been working on public speaking we have some, Marisa will attest to some of the kids. We have more introverts and extroverts by far. And I don’t know if you remember Pitch Perfect, but the girl in that movie that likes to whisper everything that’s with give or take a few kids. So I’m working on it a little bit.

[00:23:55] Jake White: That’s funny. Well, she was the one in Pitch Perfect. She was really good at beat boxing though.

[00:23:59] Tyler Morton: We usually use another example of how we associate it to the kids. But she was the one that could beat boxer. Especially coming from the DJ realm. And then Marissa being in Juvenile Services in this area for so long. We tell the kids constantly really guys, speak up, and state your first and last name. Tell them why it’s important because they don’t want to hear from us. They want to hear from you guys. Its way more impactful coming from the youth than it is coming from the table.

[00:24:31] Jake White: I think a lot of times it’s giving them a quick win that builds that confidence because they’re like, “How would I go from being scared to presenting in front of the Rotary Club or presenting in front of my student body?” Like that’s the top tier. I have to present in front of my friends. That’s actually terrifying. So like building him up from there. And what I’ve seen is with, especially with my movement, teaching students how to get sponsors, that’s the easiest one because they’re actually excited. They’re like, “Alright, we’re asking for pizzas or asking for snacks or drinks, whatever it is.” And they’re really excited. And it’s an easy way to break the ice talk to an adult. And they come out of there, “Yes, we did here.” He’s what adult business owner says no to a middle school or high school kid who’s trying to do some good in the world, they just have such great success with it.

[00:25:23] Tyler Morton: So they’re gonna say, we’re just really mean, we just throw them out in front of County Commissioners and say these are the people that make the laws in your county, go and go talk to them. It’d be fine. Now they’ve done an awesome job. Again, it’s kind of that life experience, you don’t really know what you don’t know until you until you go and experience it. We have a couple kids that are super brave. They’re like, “Oh, we could do this on a whim.” And then you give them a live mic or whatever. They’re just like, first time you’ve ever heard him be quiet in their entire lives. So it goes, but another awesome, they’re working on it, we’re doing exercises and stuff like that to just to prepare them a little bit more for that. Because even with the Cadca conference, they’re going to come back. We’ve told them, Look, guys, we’re gonna work, we’re going to have fun, but we’re going to work, we need to be able to share this with the decision makers, we need to be able to share this with our schools, it doesn’t do us a lot of good to go train and then come back and not tell anybody what we learned. So that’s part of the expectation we have with them and they’re growing acclimated to that for sure.

[00:26:23] Jake White: Well, let’s close with this, if it’s okay, I would love to hear from both of you just, hey, what’s something that you’re really proud of that youth group program, or just within your Juvenile Justice Program, y’all have been able to do that other people could maybe duplicate, that they can be inspired, and they can try as well.

“Pride in Prevention Work”

[00:26:42] Tyler Morton: I’ve been here just over a year, goes through a year and a half. Now, I think the biggest piece for me probably the biggest win right now. It’s just seeing the kids that have been with us for a period of time start to get on fire for what we’re doing. And start to share that with those that we talked about, like they don’t have any idea what “Youth Crew” is really working on the recruitment and stuff like that. The engagement from the kids, again, it’s not easy to keep, especially sixth through eighth grade, I feel like the focus is just kind of all over the place, plus everything else we’ve got going on in life. We have a lot of kids that are in the sports heavily, we have a lot of kids that are into other activities heavily. So for them to give us any part of their time is awesome. Having the families as involved. I’m sitting here looking at like our active roster right now. I think we have really good rapport with all these families. I think three kids that had been in the program the entire time since they started this. And in several that have kind of come in and out just depend on what scheduled schedules are like. But they always seem to with the kids. We were talking about this yesterday. And one of the girls mentioned, she said, I feel like I’m doing a good part and “Youth Crew”, but I still don’t feel like I’m doing enough. And to me that was really big because it says, we are ready for to take that next step. How do we get there? And can you guys put those resources in front of us and just getting them to take ownership of what we’re doing again, that was probably my most difficult part coming in last year was less adulting, and more useless stuff. And, Marissa and I would have multiple conversations about, we got to get out of the way and let them do this kind of deal. And it’s finally starting to sink in and get to the place where these kids have been here long enough with us. You guys know, you guys know what you’re supposed to be doing and what you’re trying to accomplish? Tell us what you want to do and we’ll try to get you out there and get it done. So just being the vessels and not the workhorses.

[00:28:46] Jake White: And that’s creating a great experience for the students. So that’s great. Marissa, is there anything just in your tenure doing what you do now that you’re proud of and that could inspire other people?

[00:28:59] Marissa Woodmansee: I think there’s lots to be proud of. The world of prevention is hard work, and to have the momentum that we have, and to be able to create and cultivate the kids that we have, and to continue to build them up and highlight the efforts that they’re making with the state initiatives, our county initiative and the city initiatives. I think that that speaks volumes. And I think that as far as replicating this, it’s an easy lift. And one of the things that Tyler just said is sometimes we kind of get out of our own way and little less adulting and I caught him twice yesterday. So he’s catching on. He’s only been here a little over a year and even then was gone for a bit, so it just takes time. And sometimes this not just with prevention folks, but also with the Juvenile Justice. I want more money in prevention because it does work. We have enough information now to do the work with the evidence based strategies that have been outlined to us. By state and federal governments, as well as with the fidelity of it, and those are the funnies of even Tyler is like, “I’ve used that word more times in the last year than in my lifetime.” And even my stakeholders at my level, kind of give me that ribbing of what does it really mean? It means that if you follow the instructions, as written said, it will work and it will have a good outcome and a good product. Is there going to be that 1% of outlier, maybe, but it’s still worth the effort. And I think that this is where you go back to that little ounce of prevention is worth it in the end. But if I say come back in a couple of years and see what kind of magic we’ve made.

[00:30:51] Jake White: Well, that’s incredible. Thank you both for the work that you’re doing and for chatting with me about it. I know it’s going to be really helpful and encouraging to people who are in the same shoes because they have the DFC grant. Maybe they don’t, they’re running prevention in their schools, but to hear someone is doing as much as y’all are and in a rural location is really, really encouraging. So thanks again for all that y’all are doing. And for everybody listening to the Party Talk podcast. I hope this was empowering to you and we’ll see you next Monday for another episode. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a review. Y’all have a great day.