Youths Have A Cause - And An Effect Quietly, Teens Stepping Forward

Nowell Bamberger rode into his first demonstration on his dad’s back. He was too young to understand the commotion at the Alaska airport, the signs and picketers protesting planes they believed shuttled supplies to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

For Nowell, protests were just part of life with parents who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, when youth slipped into activism like favorite bell-bottom jeans.

At 15, Nowell is now a high school sophomore who devotes much of his own spare time to community issues.

Is he following in his parents’ footsteps? Not exactly.

Nowell, like many of his peers, takes a vastly different approach to making his mark on the world. His father, Jim Bamberger, wore shoulder-length hair, “earth” shoes and bell-bottoms that distanced him from the bureaucrats he fought against; Nowell keeps his hair short, suit and tie handy.

The elder Bamberger attended rallies outside city hall. Nowell goes there to quiz mayoral candidates on how they’ll improve Spokane for teens.

“He sort of protested and worked outside the system. I’m working inside the system,” says Nowell, who attends Lewis and Clark High School. “You could go hold a sign down by City Hall, but that’s not going to get you anywhere. Working inside, it’s a more directchannel to influence and change.”

Youth today don’t march, chant or wave signs with the vigor of their parents’ generation. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less involved in their communities. Generation Y has earned the distinction of volunteering more than any other in American history. Instead of burning bras and draft cards, they’re rocking babies at crisis nurseries, organizing blood drives and collecting blankets for homeless people.

“This is just absolutely unique to American culture,” says Steve Culbertson, president of Youth Service America in Washington, D.C. “It’s become kind of a cool thing. There’s a certain positive peer pressure that we haven’t had before.”

A poll by the Independent Sector/ Gallup found that about 60 percent of kids between 12 and 17 volunteer, compared with 49 percent of adults. And the number of students involved in service-related programs has soared from 900,000 to 12.6 million in the past 15 years, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“It certainly undermines any argument that this generation is simply self-absorbed to the degree that all it wants to do is play video games or get drunk or go out and make money in the stock market,” says Dale Soden, a Whitworth College professor who specializes in cultural history.

So why the surge in volunteering amid a lower reported interest in world and national affairs?

Without a world crisis or war threatening them directly, more youth are turning their abundant energy to local issues. Educators encourage them, and potential employers are impressed with volunteer work.

“The activists of the ‘60s and ‘70s were convinced that the only way to change things was to challenge the system from without,” Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth, said in an e-mail interview. “Today’s young people believe that it’s better to work for change from within - and I think they’re right.”

Bob Isitt, who teaches social studies at Shadle Park High School, says his students are interested in world events but not in the same intense, personal way. “There’s not a spark for them. There’s no Vietnam, women have made great strides, minorities have made great strides. The sense of helplessness isn’t there anymore.”

But that would change in a heartbeat under the right circumstances, such as “a war, anyplace on the globe where they could conceivably be involved,” says Soden.

Jim Bamberger, now a 45-year-old Spokane attorney, found it impossible to ignore politics and world issues when he was growing up in suburban Milwaukee. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the Vietnam War, the students killed during war protests at Kent State University. Like many youth, he went from one protest to another.

Bamberger was especially moved by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, when he was barely a teenager. “You couldn’t ignore what was going on around you. It was a very frightening time,” says Bamberger.

Not only do kids today have more incentive to volunteer, Powell says they also have more time. They’re in school longer preparing for more complex careers. In generations past, many joined the work force as soon as possible, married younger, started raising families.

Today, Powell says, youth volunteers “just need to be asked.”

Kids are first to admit that community service looks great on job resumes and college applications. Universities, inundated with applicants who boast high SAT scores and flawless grade-point averages, increasingly look for students with an edge. Often, that’s community service.

Colleges have begun stressing volunteerism in their own classes, too. At Gonzaga University, 25 professors teach courses with community-service components.

“It’s a real trend in higher education,” explains Sima Thorpe, who directs Gonzaga Center for Community Action and Service Learning. “To be more cutting edge and survive, they need to philosophically extend their borders beyond campus. There is much more of a concern about students who are more well-rounded individuals.”

High schools are giving kids a head start with unprecedented opportunity to volunteer. Some offer credit along with encouragement.

At Lake City High School in Coeur d’Alene, students can earn one credit for 80 hours of community service. Together, students rack up more than 30,000 hours a year, says Donna Messenger, who directs the youth volunteer program.

Today’s service options are often more enticing than the routine snow shoveling and food drives, says Messenger. “Now the kids are into environmental projects where they actually get to go out and build a trail. We’re trying to teach more through what they’re doing than what we used to.”

At Mount Spokane High School in Mead, students plan school-wide volunteer activities every month, from blood drives to coat collections to highway cleanup days.

Nowell Bamberger admits he joined the Chase Youth Commission partly to dress up his resume, but he stays to promote teens in Spokane. Nowell says he’s tired of getting suspicious looks from store clerks just because he’s a kid.

As a Hutton Elementary School fifth-grader, he petitioned to stop the use of plastic forks in the cafeteria. In eighth grade, he worked as a legislative page for Sen. Margarita Prentice, a Seattle Democrat. He has distributed leaflets for numerous politicians.

One sunny afternoon last week, Nowell sat in Mayor John Talbott’s conference room urging Chase commission members to make a top priority of involving kids in policy-making. “Youth aren’t underrepresented in government,” he said. “They’re not represented.”

Tyson Reed, who attends the REAL School at Havermale Alternative Center, believes teens have more impact when they blend rather than stand out. He learned that lesson when he and friends distributed fliers to protest the opening of the Shadle Center Wal-Mart. Police shooed away those with numerous body piercings and odd-colored hair while he slipped unnoticed through the parking lot, slapping fliers on windshields.

“To be heard, you have to be able to relate,” says Tyson, 16. “That’s why I feel I might be able to make a difference.”

Tyson attends meetings of a growing organization called Youth for Social and Political Change. In the past decade, the group, which meets in the Peace and Justice Action League building in downtown Spokane, has grown from a handful of kids to nearly 30. They ride bicycles in large groups to encourage people to park gas-guzzling cars, and they serve food to homeless people in a program called Food Not Bombs.

Rita and George Waldref of north Spokane made volunteering a family affair.

Their daughters, Amber and Vanessa, greeted homeless people at the Thanksgiving dinner at St. Patrick’s Parish. They saved nickels to feed poor children overseas.

Each night at the round oak dinner table, the family talked about world affairs, from pollution to war to civil rights. They also talked about privilege and responsibility. “You’ve been given gifts and you need to use them to help other people,” Rita reminded the girls again and again.

Now that her daughters are grown, she jokingly wonders if she overdid it. Their schedules are exhausting but show that community service and political activism aren’t mutually exclusive. A few highlights:

Vanessa, a 20-year-old junior at Georgetown University, protests sweatshops and teaches kids from low-income families to play the saxophone. Amber, who’s 23, works for Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford Nuclear Reservation watchdog group. During fall break last year, the girls protested at the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

Evenings at the round dinner table are quiet now. Rita Waldref sits there alone, penning letter after letter to legislators to support her daughters’ various causes.

“Now they’re inspiring me,” she says, misty-eyed at the irony. “It’s come full circle.”