Mark Dowds

Twelve03

I just arrived back in Toronto after a very interesting week in Vancouver. One of the reasons I was out in the wild west was to connect with some people who are making a significant difference in the realm of youth mobilization and innovation. We met together to dream about how we could all work together more to bring change in our world. We created a new organization called Twelve03 that can house all of us and give us an opportunity to consult together. I will post more about it soon.

Twelve03 has many meanings of which one was the number of Simon's apartment.

Here are the people and the organizations they represent:
Dev Aujla from DreamNow
Simon Jackson from The Spirit Bear Youth Coalition
Darian Kovacs from Love Global
Salimah Ebrahim from The Spirit Bear Youth Coalition
Charles Tsai from The Global Youth Fund
Morgan Tincher from Smorgasbord Holdings
Shawn Smith from Agents of Change
Zahra Ebrahim from Architext
Justin McElroy from PACT

One of the most fun moments was coming up with our name and getting a logo all within a 2 hour period...the site will be coming very soon.

Teenagers

I was a youthworker for about 12 years of my life and still wonder if I still am today. I think is spend as much time supporting youth workers and youth as I do in my real work (apparently paid capacity). A good friend of mine Mark Oestreicher posted about an LA times article this evening about teens. This article is heavily influenced by Howe and Stauss who have written some legendary books on generational behavior.

This article is a challenge to me:

"Selfish kids would seem unlikely to get along with their parents. Yet several surveys indicate that today's teenagers are very close to their moms and dads. Record numbers claim they "share their parents values" or "have no problem with any family member." Increasingly they say they want to live near their parents later in life — a reassuring prospect if Social Security collapses under the demographic weight of the boomers."

I have such a beef with this sort of statistic as it does little justice to the reality that each of us live within our parents value set and also live to ensure their unmet dreams are still fulfilled.

Beyond my own opinions, i think that this article is too prescriptive and not in touch with reality. I have held Howe and Strauss in esteem until now. Today I am wondering if they have lost touch an are instead living by the statistics they were looking for