How Mapping Works

'Youth mapping' isn't a new concept, but the way we're doing it is. Mapping with us is a completely youth-driven project, both in how it's conducted and in what it produces.

It's pretty simple, really. Young people go out, meet adults in the community who may have something to offer them, ask them the questions they want to ask, write their findings up, and post them so other people their age can see them.

But from that simple process comes two great things:

The skills that young people learn by doing the mapping. This is a journalistic process, and mappers who do it learn to present themselves professionally to adults, ask questions and follow-up questions, record answers, write their notes into a clear and concise entry, and post those entries onto a GPS-enabled website. Better yet, by meeting and interviewing people as diverse as farmers, retail store owners and artists, they've uncovered opportunities that they didn't know existed. They can act on those contacts themselves — three young mappers have found jobs through the mapping process — or not act on them, as they wish. But at least they know a lot more about 'what's out there' than they did before.

The results mapping produces for others. Not everybody wants to work for an animal shelter, or help shovel a neighbor's driveway, or volunteer to take tickets at a jazz concert. Or be an afterschool program tutor, construction worker, county dump recycler, or tree-planter. But lots of young people would like to do these things. Maybe their school requires them to do community service, or maybe they want to try out a potential career. Maybe they want to do something fun, or maybe they want to make a few extra dollars. The motive doesn't matter. What does matter is: who do they call, where do they go, what's involved, what skills are necessary? What would this thing really be like, if they did it? And would they get paid? That's what mapping produces: the low-down on specific kinds of opportunities, written by young people for their own peers.

Mapping, by the way, has some other advantages. It helps adults in the community get to know teenagers better, and makes them aware that teenagers might like to work alongside them to learn or accomplish something. Lots of people our mappers interview end up offering to take youth volunteers or interns for the first time. And the mappers themselves learn that adults are more eager to help and share than they ever thought. Cool all the way around.