Giving Compass' Take:

• Dan Porterfield shares insights from the 2018 State of Native Youth report and calls for funders to empower Native youth to tackle the challenges in their communities. 

• How can you best engage with Native youth in your area? What needs are the greatest in your community? 

• Read the 2018 State of Native Youth report.

Our world faces many challenges, many of them shared across communities, all of them affecting our young people. They include:

  • Increasing feelings of isolation, loneliness, and social pressures—including rising rates of opioid addiction and youth suicide.
  • Physical issues, like both obesity on the one hand and the tyranny of thinness-obsession on the other.
  • The needs and challenges faced in all cultures by girls, which in truth really comes down to the power imbalance that still limits the lives of girls and women in ways we most address.

Many of these challenges, of course, cut deeper in Native communities and affect Native youth more profoundly—and the solutions Native youth offer are that much more profound, too.

We can, to solve some of these problems now. But we also need to educate and empower, lift up and listen to young people as they innovate and inspire and begin to take the reins of leadership.

The 2018 State of Native Youth report offers a pathway forward so that we can learn, retool, refocus, and forge ahead with solutions built on a strong cultural foundation.

This State of Native Youth report, the third of its kind, highlights what is working well in Native American communities: young people who are championing and collaborating on novel solutions to persistent problems.

Read the full article about Native American youth by Dan Porterfield at The Aspen Institute.