Large Group Issues!

Winchester, MA now has a youth group, 9-12, of nearly 100 youth (we have about 350 in the congregation). We've been over 60 in our youth group for about 5 years now, so our kids don't remember what it was like when we had 15 (oh... but I do!!!), nor do they remember what it was like when in 2 years we went from 15 to over 40. Those were the hard years....

Where are the resources for UU youth groups when they are HUGE - or, for that matter, over 25 or so? There aren't any, really; I've had to look to other denominations to see what they are doing (they are obviously doing something right). Similarly, the YRUU model of youth empowerment which often equates to youth running their meetings and their group doesn't work well at all.

There is another dynamic that comes with growth, too: how do you get youth, who are used to a small youth group, to welcome the many changes that take place when it does start to grow, and embrace them?

Here are a couple things we did that really worked well:

What we realized in the first years when we began to explode in numbers was that the grousing about the size was a response by the youth not to the numbers, but rather to the level of intimacy they reached in the group. To combat that, we started doing a major service project early in the year. When you're building a house for Habitat and you have one week, it turns out that it is really great to have 40 youth working on it! And, in my opinion, there is no better way to quickly bond a group who don't know each other than to spend a week in pretty dismal surroundings doing really hard labor that requires teamwork. Similarly, youth in that group recognized early in the year the benefits of having more of them - they got to do more stuff, harder stuff, and "grander" stuff, and upon returning from the service trips immediately began thinking in a new way: what else could we do with this many people? It was a complete paradigm shift for them, and thereafter, meetings where they just sat around and talked or held a worship service were no longer really "enough" - those were still nice, but no longer met their perceived potential.

At the same time, we gave individuals in the group many more opportunities than they'd had previously to connect in various ways with the church "upstairs." We put a youth on every church committee, we had them doing things in services, babysitting at meetings, sextoning, teaching RE, making food for coffee hour - anything that gave them the chance to do something they were interested in and connect them to other ways to other adults in the congregation (who they then enlisted to chaperone and assist in every and any way possible).

The following year, we hired more staff and we paid them well enough that we were able to have many opportunities for our rising numbers of youth to gather throughout the week, as well as on Sundays. We run our youth group like a church, with social gatherings, choirs, service activities, Sunday worship, meetings, committees, a small group ministry program, etc. Youth have the opportunity to run events, meetings, fundraising activities, etc. during the week if they so choose, and anything is fair game as long as they put effort into it. Our Assistant Youth Director Sean O'Brien and I help them with planning and organizing those, and Sean and I run Sunday meetings and worship. Sean and I also offer occassional after-school drop-ins, potlucks, movies, open-mike nights, poetry slams - pretty much anything anyone in our group that year is interested in, we try to provide. Sean and I both also happen to be musicians, so we started choirs and bands too.

Side note for anyone wishing they could grow their youth group: I think it's important to note that after several years of just barely keeping up, we finally staffed for growth. The first year that we had an Assistant Youth Director and I went to 3/4 time, we had plenty of things on the calendar that no one showed up to. We don't have anything on the calendar that draws fewer than 15 -20 people now. I am certain that we would not have grown had we not built it first; I'm also certain we wouldn't have grown if we'd asked adults from the congregation to volunteer to do mine or Sean's job.

Anyway, having lots of different stuff for youth each week keeps our numbers down -- no one youth could possibly come to everything -- but they continue to be religious about showing up Sundays for our "large group gathering." We currently have anywhere from 50-60 on a Sunday.

These Sunday meetings always have a theme, and the following format: check-in (answer a question, or one word, etc - anything guided), game with a point, individual writing activity with a point, share in a large group, break into small groups (I pick groups) for discussion or activity, come back to large group to discuss, closing. It works really well.

Our congregation is incredibly proud of its youth program, and it has supported it financially and otherwise every step of the way. It wasn't easy to do because there just aren't that many models in the UU world for this kind of youth program, but we've proven that it is definitely possible and so incredibly worthwhile to move in this direction.