Youthful Grant Makers Seek Ways to Bridge Troubled Racial Waters

As one of the only biracial students in her suburban Washington, D.C., middle school, Jennifer

Occean says she used to come home from school crying because kids teased her about having a black father and Hispanic mother. She transferred to another school after the parents of her best friend, who was white, wouldn’t let the girls be friends anymore because of their racial differences.

Now 16, Jennifer is using some of those painful childhood memories to inform her choices as a grant maker. Along with 14 other high-school students, she serves on the Montgomery County Youth Council, a Maryland program run by the Community Foundation of the National Capital Region to show young people how grant making works. Last year, the youth council granted $20,500 to five organizations that serve youths.

The AOL Time Warner Foundation gave $300,000 to the community foundation in 2001 to start four Washington-area youth councils, including the one in Montgomery County. The youth councils recently obtained an additional $80,000 grant from Fight for Children, a Washington group that works to improve the quality of life for children in need, as well as a few other grants from local foundations.

One of the main missions of the Washington-area community foundation is to help people of different racial backgrounds understand and relate better to one another, and the youth councils ultimately hope to apply that mission to kids. Montgomery County, a northern suburb of Washington, has become a racial melting pot in the past decade, as its minority population has increased sharply. Minorities now represent more than 40 percent of the county’s residents, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, up from just over 27 percent in 1990.

Silvana Straw, a senior program officer at the community foundation, enlisted the help of nonprofit organizations in the region to recruit youngsters age 14 to 18 to serve as the first group of council members. Fifteen kids signed up for the Montgomery County council the first year — a mix of boys and girls who are black, Asian, white, and Hispanic.

Yasmin Haghighi, 15, heard about the youth council through a friend’s father who works at a community center that serves Vietnamese immigrants. She had been volunteering as a “diversity leader” at her high school, training peers to be open-minded, and had heard students talk openly about dealing with a death, living with an alcoholic, or being sexually or physically abused. She saw the youth council as a way to expand her work with teenagers.

“When I realize the kinds of things my peers have been through, it really touches me, and that’s why I stay involved,” Yasmin says. “People don’t see things as having influenced us — teens are seen as rebels, and like we haven’t experienced much. A lot of teens try to cover that stuff up and act like it doesn’t faze them, but it really does.”

Priorities for Giving

Soon after the Montgomery County council was formed, its members established four priorities for their grant making: teenage health; prenatal care for teenage mothers; domestic violence and abuse affecting young people; and recreational sports.

To get started, the Washington-area youth councils met both with executives from local nonprofit organizations to talk about the challenges of giving away money, as well as with other youngsters who participated in the Michigan Community Foundation’s Youth Project, which was initiated in 1988 and served as a model for the Washington-area youth councils.

The councils meet for about two hours every other week. They typically review grant proposals, reading and discussing the answers grant seekers have included on a three-page form designed by the students. Then after they narrow the field — last year, the council received two applications for every grant it financed — they visit the programs run by the top candidates.

While council members look for ways to streamline the grants process as much as possible, Ms. Straw says the kids sometimes get restless. “They don’t have a lot of patience for process,” she says. “By the second meeting, if they were still working on the same thing, they would get frustrated.”

Yasmin agrees that grant making — especially reviewing and discussing grant proposals — has turned out to be more tedious than she initially expected. “It felt like being on a jury because we had to negotiate and compromise,” she says. “But it was important to do because we were trying to make a good judgment on who would use the money productively.”

The kids say they have been most impressed with teenage grant seekers who bring tangible support to meetings — statistics, studies, or surveys — to make the case for their projects. Council members say they notice what kinds of clothes kids wear, adding that they prefer peers who are well-dressed and well-groomed but not ostentatious. Most important, they look closely for youth-led programs. If an adult dominates the discussion, that group almost never receives grant money.

Drawing on Experience

Many of the youth-council members draw from personal experience when they vote for which grant proposals to accept. Jennifer Occean has favored a program in which teenage girls go into the classrooms of younger students and put on seminars about harassment, sexual violence, and self-esteem. Javier Berrios, 15, feels strongly about prenatal-care programs for teenage mothers; his sister had her first baby at age 15. “She got no help, other than from my parents,” Javier says.

Such personal connections helped convince almost all of the kids on the Montgomery County council to return for a second year, says Glen O’Gilvie, a program officer at the community foundation. Of the 15 original members, 12 returned, and two others graduated.

At its first meeting this school year, in late November, the group developed a formal recruiting process for new members because so many kids now want to be a part of the council, Mr. O’Gilvie says. The increased interest comes at a good time, he says, because the council has the added responsibility this year of following up with last year’s grant recipients to make sure they are putting the money to good use.

In addition to increasing the number of members on the Montgomery County council to about 20 this year, the teenage participants are looking for ways to apply lessons from last year toward making the council better. One change they are considering is to recruit from private schools to give the group even greater diversity.

Overall, the community foundation’s program seems to appeal to the young grant makers. Arja Nelson, 19, a council member who graduated last year, now works as an intern in the grants department at the Fannie Mae Foundation.

Others say that while the experience hasn’t persuaded them to go into nonprofit work, they plan to continue to volunteer as they get older.

“I want to be a pediatrician, but I would do nonprofit work just for the heck of it,” says Jennifer Occean. “It feels good.”