The momentum from the Community Forum and Youth Summit for Washtenaw Area Teens for Tomorrow has brought about four WATT Action Teams, and our first draft of the WATT Action Team Guide!

Thanks to your continuing interest, this new local youth development initiative has gained real traction in the community. The Action Team Guide, available as a PDF on the watt.ewashtenaw.org web site, is a summary of WATT activities to date, a timeline for the initiative, and an overview of Action Teams just waiting for your involvement. It is a draft, and we invite your comments or questions for improvements.

Each of the four Action Teams - Safe Places; Transportation; Internships & Mentoring and Youth Voice/Youth as Resources - is in the process of recruiting co-chairs. Once committed, the co-chairs will start scheduling initial meetings. By October of this year, each Team will have developed one or two program proposals and will recruit a Community Champion to help implement and raise funds for proposed programming.

The first meetings for all four Action Teams are presently being scheduled. Within the next ten days, we will e-mail those meeting times to you and to our entire stakeholder list. We want to give you every opportunity to get involved in the Action Team you’d like to join.

Even if your schedule doesn’t allow you to join one of these teams, we want to know more about your priorities for youth, your informational needs and how you can be involved in the WATT initiative. In August we’ll ask you to take an online survey on the WATT web site. That information will help guide our communication to and from the community, and help us make the best use of your time, your particular passion for and expertise in youth development.

This has been an exciting beginning for WATT, and the next steps could literally change lives. Please bookmark this web site and check out the WATT Action Team Guide. Feel free to contact me at (734) 973-4359 or, better yet by email at dalrympled@ewashtenaw.org. Cassie St. Clair (stclairc@ewashtenaw.org) and Kerry Sheldon, (sheldonk@ewashtenaw.org) are also available to answer questions, or take in ideas.

I look forward to seeing you, and hearing from you in the coming weeks!

Sincerely,

Denise Dalrymple, Director
Children’s Services Department