You are passionate, committed, creative, resourceful, resilient, and powerful. We want to know your story as a youth-serving professional or volunteer!
About the Survey
Millions of professionals and volunteers work with young people every day in the many settings where youth play, learn, and grow outside of the school day. Yet, we have little collective information about this essential workforce.
We want to know more about those who are still in the youth fields and those who left, so that we can explore, define, and elevate this collective workforce and their work with youth. The information from the Power of Us Workforce Survey can also lead to action, informing policy, practice, and further research to better support the workforce.
We believe that if we know more, we can do more.
I think the most rewarding thing about working with young people are the relationships you build with them. We’re like a little family here in my classroom and we all work as one unit. Getting to be that model for kids and helping to shape how they will learn is really rewarding for me.
Teaching youth about life values, putting yourself in their perspective, and seeing them being successful—that’s the benefit of being a mentor to students. You just want to see kids succeed and reach their full potential.
Most rewarding is just getting to know each individual student. We get to know the kids academically, and also personally—what they’re interested in, who their friends are, and also what they’re struggling with. So, that’s really my favorite, getting to build those relationships with the kids.
One of the biggest highlights of the last nine months of working in this position was when we raced cycle cross in the fall of 2021, and at the end of the season, the team was sitting around in a circle freezing cold because it was a cold December day, and nobody wanted to go home. It was the last race of the year and nobody wanted to go home, and I felt proud that they were enjoying themselves that much that they didn’t want it to be over.
I grew up in afterschool programs and I loved what they were doing. I loved how they helped me as I was growing up, so I decided to follow in their footsteps.
Being able to see the kids every day—that’s one of the things that keeps me up and going. It’s also rewarding whenever I have a really good lesson plan or a kid tells me that they’re happy that I’m here today. I look forward to that.
About Our Fields
