(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

NYB teens gain confidence, leadership skills

Tiesha Sublett would be the first to tell you: she didn't study in middle school. "I always wanted to get the last word. I resisted everything," says the 9th grader. "That's made high school a lot harder."

Tiesha's studying now. Two things have turned her around -- her determination to play basketball and her involvement in one of Louisville's Neighborhood Youth Boards, where she's learning to accept responsibility for what happens in her life.

Neighborhood Youth Boards help form the backbone of the Louisville Youth Alliance. The city's 16 boards are composed entirely of young people 13 to 19 who serve as a sounding board for the city about youth needs and instigate positive changes in their own neighborhoods.

"The model is designed to change behavior of kids in a neighborhood by changing individual behavior," Alliance Director Lynn Rippy says. "Many of the young people on the boards are the same kids who were seen as troublemakers in school or in their communities."

As the young people gain confidence and leadership skills, Rippy adds, studying, finishing school, and finding a career often become important to them for the first time.

High school sophomore Karyl Barnes, his older brother Darrell and his younger sister Victoria have been members of the Southeast NYB for several years. Karyl says the NYB experience "teaches us to be our own person, to be leaders instead of following somebody else. It makes us aware of the young ones who are coming up behind us -- of how they look to us for role models."

Field trips, direct involvement in city policymaking, and well-publicized neighborhood improvement projects have convinced many young people in some of the city's worst neighborhoods that participating in the NYB "is pretty cool," says Victoria Barnes. "They saw how much fun we were having."

Dewayne Mills agrees. "The Neighborhood Youth Boards have come a long way. When we first started, [other teens] would say to us, 'That's weak stuff. That's weak.' Now we see a lot of those same people joining."

"Some people got interested when they saw us having fun and helping too," says Karyl. "One of the biggest things we did was when we cleaned up the creek. Everybody started helping. The news came, and everybody liked being on TV. We've been on the news a lot."

"We're spreading everywhere now," DeWayne says with some satisfaction. "We're like a big family."
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