Not a Minute Too Soon | The Volunteer's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis

We're all back to school now, or will be in about a minute, and it's none too soon to introduce your volunteer team to The Volunteer's Guide 

to Helping Teenagers in Crisis.

Back in the day, Rich Van Pelt got the ball rolling with his seminal youth worker training book, Intensive 

Care: Helping Teenagers in Crisis — a few copies of which are available today at Amazon.com at prices ranging from a couple of bucks to a very impressive $588.98 (way to go, Rich!).

In the middle of the last decade, Rich and I threw in together to produce The Youth Worker's Guide to 

Helping Teenagers in Crisis, and then The Parent's Guide to 

Helping Teenagers in Crisis — which covers the same ground as the Youth Worker's Guide through the filter of what a parent needs to know (e.g. a mom doesn't need her own referral list, she needs to know that her friendly youth worker has one and she need to know how to ask for help when she needs it).

Now, we've completed The Volunteer's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis because, much like parents, volunteers need to know how to spot trouble and get help quickly, effectively and with as little drama as possible.

The Volunteer's Guide works with four DVD sessions that blend crisis stories told by real people with short teaching segments by Rich and me (mostly five minutes or less). The other learning ingredients mix personal reflection and recollection with group conversation about the kids and families your team serves, wherever you're located — be that small town, suburb, or urban center.

Session 01: Understanding Crisis     Session 02: Spotting Crisis

Session 03: Responding to Crisis     Session 04: Preventing Crisis

If you lead a team of volunteer youth workers, nobody has to tell you they're often the first to see signs of trouble in adolescents. And nobody has to remind you most of them have no idea what to do about crisis when they see it. The Volunteer's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis is your tool kit to build volunteers who know when what they're seeing is a crisis and know how to get kids the help they need in a timely and compassionate manner.

BLUE LIKE JAZZ | finally!

I stayed up late with several hundred of my closest friends at the National Youth Workers Convention in San Diego to watch a rough cut of Donald Miller + Steve Taylor's film, Blue Like Jazz.

In the spirit of full disclosure. Mr. Taylor and I have been friends for something on the order of 30 years. That said, we have an informal agreement not to kid each other. So, I can tell you what I told him: "It's really good; stop listening to other voices; finish it."

Of course, he's too polite to stop listening, but he sees things too clearly to make false compromises at this point.

Taylor directed Donald Miller's screenplay and I think it's funny, thoughtful, unpredictable and real — by which I mean two things. First, Blue Like Jazz will earn a PG-13 rating because freshman year at Reed College — the very same institution from which Steve Jobs dropped-out back in the day — was a PG-13 experience (give or take an R). So don't take your grandmother or your middle school Bible Study when this film is released next April and then pretend to be shocked — shocked! I tell you — at the language and debauchery. It's not a movie for 12 year-olds. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Raising Adults for the 21st Century

OK, that title is a play on words celebrating the news that, as of today, Raising Adults is available for:

Kindle at Amazon 

iPad at Apple*

PDF readers of any sort at Youth Specialties

Beyond the word play, I am convinced that people who practice and refine the relational patterns in Raising Adults really do produce women and men who are well suited for life in the world as we know it today.

Priced to Take You Back to the Future

I've put this book in digital form and priced it super-low (just $2.99/$2.99/$4.99 US) because — to cop a line from the writer Cory Doctorow (I'm pretty sure he snatched it from Tim O'Reilly) —

This book doesn't suffer from piracy; it suffers from obscurity.

I decided to remove the risk of buying Raising Adults so more people — I'm thinking anyone on any continent who reads English and cares about kids — can make it their own.

At those prices (we're talking numbers we haven't seen since the 1950s) , reading Raising Adults carries more risk than scraping together the change to buy it.

And in fairness I have to admit it is a somewhat risky read if we can judge such things by how mad this book makes some people of the high control, patronize-the-children-and-keep-them-silent-fat-and-happy school of parenting. Oops! Did I say that out loud?

So. Buy the book to read on your computer, Kindle or iPad — by the way, it's totally searchable when you read it that way so if you need to locate a quick topical quote or a short passage to spark conversation at a parents' meeting, it could hardly be easier.

If you truly hate this book (not so much that you want me dead but enough that you want me to suffer like you did reading it), tell me that and we'll try to work something out — maybe I'll come trim your lawn or something...if you buy the plane ticket.

And if you like Raising Adults, tell your friends.



* If you own an iPad/iPhone, you probably already know there's no online bookstore that you can navigate to from your computer — you get to books through the iBookstore app on your hand held device. You probably also know that Kindle books look great on your Apple device.

Indiana: We Salute You!

Apparently Bill Stanczykiewicz, who directs the Indiana Youth Institute, is hot stuff. His Monday column from Indianapolis is creating a bit of heat here in sleepy Leucadia. Bill was very kind in his assessment of Ten Things We Should Never Say to Kids, which is free, and Raising Adults , which is cheap (but never tawdry).

[You may recognize the image above as coming from today's Gary, Indiana Post-Tribune — How you doing, Gary?]

So, thanks Bill!

Meanwhile, I've been quietly helping Mark Matlock develop Real World Parents to launch in 2009.

And did I mention Rich Van Pelt and I are doing a six-hour extravaganza at Youth Specialties' three National Youth Workers Conventions in Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Nashville this fall? Good times, and I'm not kidding.

Back to Indiana, I'm scheduled to present workshops — on crisis intervention and Ten Things We should Never Say to Kids — at the Indiana Youth Institute's 2008 Kids Count in Indiana Conference
 the first week of December.

Also, I had parents when I was younger, so...if that doesn't make me an expert, I don't know what would.

How to Volunteer like a Pro

Here's a happy thing for me!

This is the cover concept for my new book: How to Volunteer like a Pro, due out in December 2008 from Youth Specialties.

Malaria Bites

Below, you'll find the digital movie I made with Compassion and Youth Specialties (and the talented Brian Boyle) as the year began.

In 1983, when I first engaged the conversation about ending poverty, the working number of deaths due to preventable causes was about 42,000 per day — these are fatalities statisticians lump together as excess deaths, meaning they don't have to happen. Causes of excess deaths include war, water-borne illnesses, preventable and treatable infections — things like that. In 2007, despite all hell breaking loose in a lot of places on planet earth, the number of excess deaths was about 27,000 a day. 27,000 needless deaths every day is stunning and inexcusable. It's also a third fewer than in 1983. As Scott Todd, the very bright man who directs Compassion's Special Operations (including HIV/AIDS and Malaria Interventions) told me: "If we can shrink it from 40,000 to 27,000, there's no reason to believe we can't shrink it from 27,000 to zero."

This video describes in four and a half minutes how malaria deaths — about a million of them a year and way more children than adults — can be stopped cold for less money than the U.S. spends every week in Iraq.



This is as close to a no-brainer as I've ever seen...
Malaria bites. Buy a net. Save a life. Bite Back

Raising Adults: updated and free (briefly)

[UPDATE: Raising Adults is no longer free, but's it's darned cheap at Amazon for the Kindle or iPad and at Barnes & Noble for the Nook.] 

I'm just about finished with an thorough update of Raising Adults and everything that's complete is available as a free download until January 15, 2007.

Raising Adults was first published in 1999 and the updated edition is on its way to the new YS Underground where it will be available for download in mid-January—along with my digital movies (and a whole bunch of other cool stuff).

So . . . help yourself!