Open Source Advocacy…Open Source Youth Ministry?

Our friend Jeremy Del Rio (who also teaches in our Urban Youth Ministry Certificate program) is modeling what systemic approaches to justice are all about.  An advocate for kids in his community and other communities across New York City, Jeremy and a collaborative team recently launched the 20/20 Vision for Schools movement.  Then yesterday they released a detailed action plan and model with a lofty goal of helping every kid in New York City reach their full potential.

What’s incredible to me about this plan is that it’s based on “Open Source” theory and practice.  Open source theory says basically that the best ideas often lay outside of your organizational boundaries.  It calls for a radical kind of outsourcing that fuels creative energies by inviting a broad palette of collaborators to paint their own colors into a project.  Take WordPress (WP) as an example-the content management system under-girding this website.  WP is a classic open-source phenomenon.  What WP has done is make their code fully accessible…to anyone.  That means ingenious contributions are welcome from 15 year-olds or 55 year-olds who can design plug-ins that work effectively.  Similarly, here’s what the New York team has proposed about developing strategies to overhaul public education:

Since the problems are too vast for one person, interest group, or community to overcome on its own, open sourcing ideas, best practices, funding solutions, evaluation methodologies, and reform strategies represents the best way to engage the best minds in transforming public education in this country. If it’s “about the kids,” we need to model how to share.

Brilliant.  Rather than posturing for position in the political games that often drive education reform (or fail to drive it, as the case may be), this movement seeks to open source their process and radically model sharing to kids by sharing with one another.  They, in turn, hope to be a model the whole country can follow.

There’s more than a little we can learn from this in youth ministry.  After all, it’s a group of urban youth workers who got together and started this movement in New York City. What about your town?  What about my neighborhood?  How can we partner to advocate for the issues most pressing for kids around us?  And what can we do to model open-sourcing in our ministries, sharing ideas and strategies with other youth workers who are not our competitors, but our partners in Kingdom work?  If the best ideas really could be “out there”, why do we so stubbornly continually look “in here” for the answers-whatever the most pressing questions may be in our context?

I don’t have this figured out, but I’m inspired by what our friend in New York is doing.  And I’m stirred to get better at what I continually ask my own young children to do: share.

©2008 Fuller Youth Institute