Making Room for Kids and Teens in Community Networks

Do any kids live in your community? Do they ever use the web? What services does your community network web site provide for them?

Community networks are starting to put aside sections of their web site for children and teenagers as part of their commitment to better serve their communities. (Some CNs have separate sections for kids and teens, while others find it more useful to combine the two.) Although an increasing number of good sites for young people are available on the web, community networks are in a unique position to provide information, especially local, for the kids in their area.

Adding sections for kids and teens to a CN web site does not have to be a large, expensive undertaking. The extent to which a CN builds or expands its youth section depends on its resources and the interest of kids in the community. A CN may even collaborate with a library or other local agency to build a youth page.

Resources for young people currently available on community networks fall into 3 categories:

1. Links to general youth-related web sites.

2. Directories of community resources for youth.

3. Interactive sites.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. One CN could easily have two or even all three types of resources.

Links to general youth-related web sites

Many CNs provide links to local and general sites for kids. Providing links to web sites for kids can be as simple as pointing to a few, major sites that collect this information, such as the American Library Association's 700+ Great Sites for Kids or the Internet Public Library Teen Division. Some CNs prefer to build their own collection of sites. For instance, Three Rivers Free Net of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania maintains lists of fun and educational links for kids and teens. Others use a combination of ready-made and original collections.

Directories of community resources for youth

Information about local organizations and services--addresses, phone numbers, descriptions, etc.--can be especially helpful to kids and teens who may have difficulty picking out services that are relevant to them from other sources, like the phone book. The information can be just a name and address or a link to the organization's web page. Because these are local organizations, information about them may not be available anywhere on the web except from a CN or similar web site.

The Genesee Free-Net of Michigan includes the Yellow Pages for Youth, created by the Youth Initiative Program and sponsored by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. This directory describes health, educational, social service, and legal issues young people may face and provides contact information for local agencies that deal with those issues. The contact information usually includes when the agency is open and the fees (if any).

Interactive sites

Interactive sites vary greatly from those that provide a separate guestbook just for kids to those with online conference or chat facilities, from sites that accept contributions from kids to those actually run by young people. While maintaining an interactive site requires a great deal of work, engaging kids with the site can lead to many educational and civic benefits (i.e. computer literate kids who feel connected to their communities).

One of the more ambitious efforts to involve kids is CyberSight, part of LincolnNet in the Chicago, Illinois area. Kids and teens not only contribute original articles, stories, and artwork to this electronic tabloid, but they also help serve as webmasters.

Community networks planning to add a youth section to their web sites have several, different models to build upon: they can collect links, build a directory of local resources, or create some kind of interactive site. Other untested possibilities exist too. Asking for input from the kids themselves is one way to come up with new ideas and help ensure the creation of a valuable resource for the community leaders of tomorrow.

If you know of a community network that is doing something special for children or teenagers, tell us about it: si.cn@umich.edu.