As the producer promised, our NBC regional affiliate visited BookWorm Wednesday last week to feature the neighborhood book project on the news. You can imagine the excitement around our house last Wednesday, as the kids in the neighborhood came down the road for their weekly gathering.

The cameraman took lots of video, catching all the kids in action as they listened to the story, created egg-carton bugs and checked out books.

Afterward, the reporter interviewed all the BookWorm Wednesday “Divas” to discuss the project.

Don’t you just love hearing good news about youth?

BookWorm Wednesday Series:

A Teacher in the Making
A BookWorm Wednesday Halloween
BookWorm Wednesday Potion Recipe
My Daughter Won the Kohl’s Kids Who Care Scholarship
Buy with Amazon and Donate to BookWorm Wednesday
BookWorm Wednesday Gets Some Press
BookWorm Wednesday Featured

Other Torch-Passers
YPulse Youth Marketing News

What does passing the torch mean to you? Is it teaching? Passing traditions? Doing the right thing? Or good news about youth? Join us each week for Pass the Torch Tuesday. Former PTT posts.

Winners have been announced in the giveaways for these awesome team building books.  Thanks to all who participated, and if new books aren’t in your budget, please remember to ask your local library to order them. They’re usually looking for suggestions from patrons!

Team Challenges

Great Group Games

ALSO, please note these current contests to win my book, Empowering Youth:

Momsational (Shannon Hutton’s review is at Ask the School Counselor)

Girlfriendology

Beauty Inside and Out

I host regular giveaways for parents and educators. Please consider signing up for updates by email or feed. We will never spam you or give out your address.

(To read all the posts about empowerment, please go to the Empowerment category page.)

Empowerment can mean many different things.

To families on Supernanny, empowerment is learning to use the tools that stabilize their homes. To oppressed women in foreign lands, empowerment is embracing an opportunity to make a choice or participate in government. To youth, empowerment is knowing someone’s listening to their ideas and recognizing them as valuable members of society.

Whether we’re mayors, teachers, neighbors or parents, we all have roles to play in empowering youth. We do it — or don’t do it– in most interactions we have with young people.

On Pass the Torch, I write frequently about how young people take initiative and accomplish outstanding things (case in point- Heather Wilder — you can still vote for her through July 25.) There are countless examples of youth doing great things, raising money for charity, or making connections for those who can’t.

But empowering youth is also the small, daily opportunities adults have with young people, to ask their opinions, listen to their ideas, teach them new skills or even follow their lead. Each interaction like this helps kids to find their own voices, to figure out their strengths, and to pursue what inspires them.

In the course of writing the book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things, I had the opportunity to interview dozens of inspiring people. One of the most memorable quotes for me, was shared by Julia Hampton, United Way Youth Initiative Coordinator:

Empowerment is having confidence because someone has spoken it into you.

It’s the track coach that gives the pep talk to push through the harmless, but uncomfortable side-ache. It’s the dad that helps his son prepare to confront a friend by role-playing the conversation. It’s the teacher that notices a student’s strength in writing and encourages her to submit an essay. It’s the business owner that says “yes” to the kid who asks to place a food drive box in the entry. It’s the neighbor that sends her kids to a neighborhood book club to support the 11-year-old who’s organizing it.

It’s every day seeing children, just as we see adults. It’s recognizing their lack of experience or education doesn’t mean their input isn’t valid.

And it’s a willingness to concede that every once in a while…

…their insight is better than our own.

My book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things, will soon be available from Search Institute Press.

Do you have a story about kids that make you proud, or adults who are passing the torch? Please let me know and I’ll spread the word on Pass the Torch Tuesday.Former PTT posts.

This seven-part series will cover the 2 ½-year time span between the day I set out to become an author and the day I became one.

Becoming an Author – Part Seven
Spring 2008

This final segment of Becoming an Author describes the past few months, when when our gears shifted toward marketing. We’d seen the cover design, and now the designer was finishing the back cover as well. I asked my editor to send the manuscript to a few like-minded authors I’d met and they offered strong testimonial blurbs for promotion.

I’d already learned so much during this process – about publishing and youth empowerment both. But my education would just begin regarding marketing piece. My confusion about when the book would be available for sale caused me to finally contact my editor, who referred me to a new team of professionals in marketing, public relations, web design and trade publication. Apparently the book would be available in July, even though the IPG release date wouldn’t happen until September. The IPG date is our in-house terminology for when the book becomes available to all the trade markets.

I went to Search Institute Press for a brainstorming meeting and was awed by the beautiful architecture in the historic Banks Building which houses Search. I was also completely impressed by the team that would be marketing my book. A do-it-yourself-er my whole life, you can imagine the relief I felt in knowing that other talented professionals would manage the press releases, trade shows, advertising and promotional contacts. I left this meeting even more buzzed about the book than I was when I entered the building.

And this brings us to today — 2 1/2 years after I decided to pursue a writing career, and more than two years since proposing the concept which turned into Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things. During this journey, few people close to me understood the process involved to making this particular life-list item happen. Few friends or family members comprehended what I was doing during those long months at the keyboard. If you’ve read this series, you now know how it happened for me.

I now anxiously await this book so I can hold it in my hands. I hope you’ll join me.

Becoming an Author series:
Part One — Winter 2006
Part Two — Spring 2006
Part Three — Summer 2006
Part Four — Fall 2006
Part Five — Winter-Spring 2007
Part Six — July 2007-February 2008
Part Seven — Spring 2008
Photos of Search Institute Press

My book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things, will soon be available from Search Institute Press.

This seven-part series will cover the 2 ½-year time span between the day I set out to become an author and the day I became one.

Becoming an Author – Part Six
July 2007-February 2008

After a year of homeschooling, we knew it wasn’t a long-term solution for us, so we did our research and chose the school district we wanted our kids to attend. We just needed to buy a house and move there. Our summer was spent doing that, and preparing to enter a new chapter in our lives.

I was also offered a part-time school counselor position in the same district, which turned out to be the perfect fit. This way I could be selective about my writing pursuits, without needing to worry as much about income. I chose not to take work-for-hire writing contracts that came my way, but rather narrowed my focus and reestablished my goals as a writer.

Throughout the next eight months, I completed several edits, usually with a month or so in-between revisions. My editor posed clarifying questions and insightful nudges to help me to tighten the focus and better define sections that were too gray. So in this way, we took turns sculpting the manuscript — each time handing off a cleaner, more readable and fine-tuned document to fresh eyes that could read the manuscript more like it was the first time. Each trade brought this little book a little closer to the final product.

During this time, I also started the overwhelmingly mundane process of requesting permission from publishers and authors for the research and diagrams that were referenced in the book. This tedious aspect of authorship was not my favorite piece of the process, but it was necessary nonetheless.

The designer finished the book cover in January and I felt a rush of “reality” when my editor forwarded the very professional-looking pdf file to me. Several focused weeks of editing followed, but most of the work at this stage was done by my editor, assistant editor, page designer and other invisible and crucial roles in the publishing puzzle.

The editing team sent the manuscript to numerous reviewers within the youth development field, to ask for feedback, and the questions and suggestions posed by these reviewers significantly contributed to the validity of our finished book.

Each time I received the edited manuscript, it would feel a little more polished, a little more focused, and a lot closer to something I’d eventually find on the shelf in a book store. Each time I read the revised chapters, after being away from them for two months, I’d look at the words with fresh eyes and be pleased with most that I saw, but irritated by an overused or repeated word I allowed to slip by. The changes I made at this point were rather small, and more because of vanity and OCD, than because of a significant need to change.

In February, my editor sent me the proofs for the designed pages. It’s hard to describe the difference between reading a version of a manuscript that LOOKS like pages in a book, versus 200 pages of double-spaced text. It’s more readable, more attractive, and at this point, it’s virtually error-free. We did have one more shot at changes even after this typesetting, but the revisions were pretty minute at this point.

Please return next week for the final installment for Becoming an Author…

Becoming an Author series:
Part One — Winter 2006
Part Two — Spring 2006
Part Three — Summer 2006
Part Four — Fall 2006
Part Five — Winter-Spring 2007
Part Six — July 2007-February 2008
Part Seven — Spring 2008
Photos of Search Institute Press

My book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things, will soon be available at Search Institute Press.