What Works 2008

One of my assignments this week was to interview a participant from the city of Scottsdale about featuring their Youth Services accomplishments in the publication, What Works 2008, specifically regarding their high performance with respect to the percentage of 100% completion of Community Services hours ordered.

The info I received was amazing, as the city of Scottsdale believes in a type of proactive engagement that encompasses far more than just merely assigning youth to pick up trash. They have professional counselors that meet with the parents/guardians and the youth to explore what underlying problems may have caused the incident. Also they have workshops designed to teach "life skills" and educate about drug abuse.

What was really surprising is that one of the community service sites is a fitness center, and many of the youth that are assigned there to clean up the machines often develop relationships with the weight trainers and other staff and become members of the gym after their service is up. So, juveniles that were otherwise bored and getting into trouble learn discipline and how to live a healthy lifestyle through weight training and sports like boxing and basketball.

After the interview I turned my notes into a section for the What Works book and sent it to the participant to review and edit (in order to make sure that I adequately represented their perspective) and then sent it off to our editor for final review.

All in a day's work as an ICMA intern.