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Today we ask you to help get the media to cover Saturdays Youth Town Hall as much as they cover the murders and other negative actions in our MA communities. Tomorrow we have several hundred “Young Agents of Change” coming together to discuss how they will make a difference in their community. Send the alert below to you media outlets and share as part of your status update.

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Event Advisory

Event Media Contact
Greta Teller; Teller Marketing Solutions
(e) GTeller@TellerMarketingSolutions.com
(m) 860.712.3124

Eric Thomas, the Hip Hop Preacher, Highlights 2011 Town Hall Leadership Event.

MassHousing and Masslmpact Bring Massachusetts’ Students Together at Harvard Law School on October 22nd to Engage Youth as Agents of Change in Their Communities.

What: 2011 Town Hall

Beginning at 8:30am, the format of the day will open and close with keynote speaker, Eric Thomas, the nationally-renowned hip hop preacher. Thomas is a motivational speaker known for his engagingly personal approach with messages that are both dynamic & inspiring speaking to youth and adults alike.

Produced by AbekaM, the 2011 Town Hall is an event open to those ages 13-18 who live in major urban cities across Massachusetts. Through a series of conversations and breakout sessions held during the day, this event hopes to encourage youth leaders by raising the bar of expectations set for young people. Topics that will be covered include strategies to overcome the challenges of education, violence and poverty and raise the expectations of youth to create future leaders. To date there are more than 350 registered.

The event is hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, is sponsored by MassHousing and Masslmpact
When: Saturday, October 22nd, 8:30am-3:00pm / Book Signing 3:30-4:30pm
Where: Harvard University Law School at 1563 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA
Who: Eric Thomas, Keynote Speaker

300+ youth (age 13-18 y/0) from throughout Massachusetts, Participants

**Media will have opportunity to interview Eric Thomas on Friday, October 21st. Please send all requests to Greta Teller at GTeller@TellerMarketingS0lutions.com by Wednesday, 10/19.

About MassHousing
MassHousing. the state’s affordable housing bank, supports the creation, preservation and long-term viability of affordable homeownership and rental housing opportunities for Massachusetts residents with modest incomes. MassHousing is a self sustaining agency and does not use taxpayer dollars in its programs. For more information, visit www.MassHousing.com.

About Eric Thomas
Eric Thomas is a nationally—renown speaker, educator, author, activist and minister who delivers a high energy message about living up to your full potential and greatness and how to break the cycles of crime, hopelessness and despair that many face daily. Known for his engagingly personal approach, his messages are both dynamic & inspiring. Eric has electrified audiences ranging
from Fortune 500 companies to urban educators, collegiate athletic programs and inner city youth development agencies with the message of his own life’s struggles and the principles, insights and strategies he used to overcome them. For more information, visit www.ETTheHipHopPreacher.corn.

About AhekaM
AbekaM’s mission is to create sustainable partnerships in support of local models of social change for under-served families and communities traditionally excluded from resource rich experiences. AbekaM envisions a world where multi—sector relationships unleash and mobilize the necessary resources to renew, amplify and protect the gifts in our target communities and for the people
who live within them. For more information, visit www.AbekaM.org.

[Week 2 02/27/08] People have asked me why I care so much and why I volunteer to lead so often. To answer, I can’t blame it all to the years of classic leadership trainings; even though now I can see where relying on just prescriptive and generalized “good” traits of a leader have sometimes failed me. I might attribute some of it to my misused “drum major instinct” energy or to the severe bonding of my personal identity with my organizing and work.

In the end, I think I keep doing this work to because I get so much out of facilitating OTHERS to be leaders. In the past week, I’ve had two concrete experiences of this circumstance, both in my work with YouthBuild Lawrence and also with a team of graduate students at MIT.

Despite the snow, I did get an hour and half of solid time with the full group of twenty YouthBuild young adult members. A big theme of our discussion revolved around their frustration with the authority of their local government and representatives, which revealed to me that these authorities lacked shared goals or meaningful relationships with this group of youth. So to begin to foster authentic, meaningful leaders from within this group, we first needed to come to some shared understandings of the issues at hand and attempt to narrow the focus. I tried to quickly learn the norms of the group around making decisions (“Should we vote?”) and decided to see what would come out of a little debate. We allowed the youth to self-select which group to create and what issue to argue for, but to pick one representative to speak. Two-thirds of the group clustered around the loudest males and chose police corruption. A smaller group formed around a more soft-spoken but very articulate member and chose pollution. And one lone, older male member stood alone and wrote his own treatise on Section 8 housing selection procedures. But none of the three succeeded in gaining a majority of the group, regardless of their volume, popularity, or dedication. The leadership of this group, which will be both self selected and recommended by staff, will have to work more on building relationships in order to energize both the immediate YouthBuild constituents as well as other youth in Lawrence. Yet, I think we launched this team well, according to Heifetz and Hackman advised, we didn’t start with a job description of a manager, but rather framed leadership as “adaptive work” activities we all could possibly share before assigning individuals or creating roles. Hopefully this process will create some team bonding around shared responsibilities and boundaries and combat the tendency for some of the group to say “I don’t care…I just want somebody to lead us.” So to rephrase Stan Lee, with great leadership power, comes great shared responsibility, like it or not.