Something I am just not a fan of is the combination of Youth and Young Adults all the time. I feel like I can speak to this – I am a young adult and I am a youth advisor. Yes, it is rather convenient for me to have one stop shopping, but in our denomination it’s just true that youth tend to get more of the focus than young adults. I have to throw out a disclaimer here, none of this should be construed in any way shape or form as saying we should take resources away from youth and shift it to young adult. No way. I’m saying we need to increase the focus and resources for young adults.
Why do youth get more focus than young adults? Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of different thoughts I’ve heard on this. Youth tend to be children of, well, boomers who tend to be in power in the denomination, in our congregations, but young adults tend to be newcomers to the faith and don’t have the resources (aka, cash money) to make as big of an impact. Young adults voices don’t have the same….well, legitimacy I guess, if the pledge dollars aren’t there to match it. It could be that youth just comes first in the title, so people tune out after hearing youth. It could be that at General Assembly, the youth caucus votes as a block and the young adult caucus does not vote as a group, leaving decisions to the individual conscience of the members of the young adult. (How many people at GA noticed when the youth caucus went up to make their statement, how many noticed when a young adult was up there? Youth are more visible as a result.)
I think we need to split youth and young adults. How are the needs of 15 year olds similar enough to those of 35 year olds? Each group has its own special needs from a church. Is it any wonder that most of Young Adult programming has been based on the “con culture?” That’s the general focus on the youth side, so it bleeds into the young adult side as well.
We as a denomination just do a better job with youth than young adults. Our congregations just do a better job with youth than young adults. This doesn’t mean we do a good job with youth, its just that we do a better job with youth than young adults. Less than 20% of graduating youth stick with UUism. That’s not the fault of youth programming, it’s the fault of lackluster young adult programming. Of course, we also lose a fair amount of middle schoolers going into high school – I don’t know what those percentages look like, but there is a loss in the RE to Youth transition as well, but it’s not as drastic of a drop as Youth to Young Adult bridging.
Congregations take much more seriously work with youth over work with young adult. How many congregations have a Youth Minister/Youth Coordinator? How many have a Young Adult Minister/Campus Ministry Coordinator? I have no clue, but I imagine there’s a substantial gap between the two.
I acknowledge there are legitimate financial reasons behind combining youth and young adults at the UUA. But under the UUA, we ought to have a coordinator of the youth and young adult office, then two people under that position, a Youth coordinator and a Young Adult coordinator, equal levels.
There was definitely a strong undercurrent at GA, both within the YA Caucus and outside of it, that Youth just get more respect than Young Adults, and it got some YAs pretty frustrated and/or angry. The last thing we need to do as a denomination is create artificial divisions among populations we need to do a better job serving. When resources are combined between two groups but not equally dispersed between those two groups, there’s going to be some resentment on some level of it. And that sucks. Because as a Young Adult Youth Advisor, I want to see both Youth and Young Adults get the respect they deserve. Get the resources they need. Get the faith that will change their lives.
As it stands now…we aren’t living up to our promise.
[Update] I want to encourage everyone reading this to also read the comments on this one. I just posted one long enough to be a separate blog post 
I’m an old adult and a sometime youth advisor. I completely agree. We’re lately seeing an influx of YA (20s-30s) folks in our congregation and are trying to be mindful of how to serve their distinctive needs.
Mixed feelings; you are right that 15-year-olds and 35-year-olds have different needs. But so do 40-year-olds and 70-year-olds, so should there be a Senior Citizens’ Caucus, too? What about a Disabled Caucus, or a Women’s Caucus, or a Boys’ Caucus, or . . . the list could go on and on, and, IMHO, too often does.
When the youth got up to speak as a crowd in SLC, I got angry—just as I was doing watching this year’s GA from my laptop at home in N.J. this year. Only one person was speaking, saying he or she was from the Youth Caucus; why did they need to troop up in a group? Do they really believe AILL youth have the same opinion, or that delegates can’t understand “I am representing XXX members of the Youth Caucus”? I am not a fan of caucuses in legislatures, I am no more a fan of caucuses at GA. It is time we all respect our individuality, our commonality with those who are similar, and, yes, our commonality with those who are different.
Thanks for letting me vent.
I totally understand where you are coming from Sallijane. In our congregation, we do have generational affinity groups that span pretty much all generations in the church. (The 40s and 50s caucus are still getting their group together, but have had a good start.) Within congregations generational affinity groups make all the sense in the world to me.
At the same time, take a look at who is visible in your congregation. Odds are the people you think of aren’t young adults (or they are in the minority.) In order to keep young adult visitors, there has to be visible young adults. It gets weird being surrounded by old hippies all the time. (I was weired out at GA during the peacemaking mini assembly, there were 3 YAs, me, and two I talked into going, and one bridger. Everyone else was, well, living in the vietnam war era.) I would not have stayed with UUCA if it weren’t for the 20/30s group there. But look how I’ve turned out, I think I’ve done pretty good work for my home congregation
(From what other people have told me at least.) Our congregations are not all they can be if we turn off any segment of the population – we’re big on being multicultural, but growing YA groups is NOT talked about that much denomination wide other than, well, me hollarin’ on this blog 
Take a look at the UU World and the past couple of issues – multicultural is front and center right now, but where’s the call to be welcoming for YAs, changing the faith so YAs feel comfortable, etc.? We focus so much on race in our denomination we forget about ageism in our congregations. So, allow me to be the one to poke and prod for a bit 
One of my ministers started to bring this up to me before we got sidetracked by a vote at GA. I think she was about to start talking about how actively identifying as a young adult makes me seem just like a member of the young adult group rather than an active member of the congregation, of the denomination as a whole. And I get that. I’m not just a young adult, I’m an active, involved lay leader in my congregation. Just identifying myself as a young adult gives people the impression I’m less than what I am.
I, of course, have problems with that. Not that I think she’s wrong, I think she’s right, and THATs what I have a problem with.
I liked the YA caucus – if we had decided to vote as a block, I would NOT have attended further YA caucuses. My congregation didn’t charge me to vote in one way or the other, my caucus won’t either. I’m going to go with what my conscience tells me to do and the YAs at GA generally felt the same way, hence, no block boting.
I do get why youth vote as a block though, it amplifies their voice at GA when Youth and Young Adults are generally under-represented compared with their membership and attendance in congregations. We just generally can’t afford to make it out to GA, so we stay home and don’t vote. That visual of a block voting together reminds people that there are a lot of Youth and Young Adults out there who aren’t at GA.
Geesh, this comment turned out to be long enough for an entire separate blog post!
I agree, and disagree.
In regards to the Caucus: the YA Caucus used to make caucus statements, same as you get the opinions from the Youth Caucus, DRUUMM, ARE, etc at the mics. Several years ago, the YA Caucus decided to not do it one year, because they were trying to force their parent organisation (C*UUYAN) to actually care about GA and not treat it at the bastard red headed step child of UU events. It ended up backfiring, and the caucus lost the memory and ability to organise. And more than anything else, it’s the inability to organise that’s important. You mention that the youth get more respect. Over the last 15 years, they’ve earned that respect, by being good organisers, of themselves and the wider GA population. Over the same time, YA’s as a group have declined as organisers, particularly at GA.
I will disagree with Sallijane. If UUs aren’t able to gather together, and have a voice together, then there’s no point in even having an Association, and especially not a GA. At least the youth are trying to work as a group, and do a better job of LOBBYING than most any other group in our faith (And I think the youth do a TERRIBLE job of lobbying. I think most other UU Groups, particularly at GA, do a shamefully bad job of lobbying).
We aren’t, or shouldn’t be, Individuals at GA. We are the representatives of our congregations. A bit more often I’d like to see delegates get up to a mic and say “I personally believe X, but I refuse to vote on this because my congregation was too lazy to discuss this topic”.
As for the issue of ConCulture, I don’t think the issue you raise has as much to do with how the districts or congregations treat YA’s as much as it happens to be that the organisations and networks of YA’s that organise the cons are made up of ex-Youth leaders who never learned other methods of organsation, which then makes congregational leaders think that’s normal and good, because they KNOW who these leaders are. It’s the one situation where youth who grew up in our faith and stay as young adults actually are recognised for the work they do… it just happens to be work that doesn’t support the growth of our faith or congregations.
As a former district staff person that worked in YACM ministry specifically, (youth ministry was someone elses job) I can say that more congregations here had YA organisers than youth organisers, and certainly more ministers with YA/CM ministry in their portfolio than youth ministry. The biggest problem, I think, in the youth to YA bridging (previously termed The Gap), is that our congregations don’t talk to one another, and make little to no attempt to make sure that any youth leaving their area are taken care of in another area.
Every single congregation/DRE should be taking the few minutes required to find out where a given graduating youth is going to school, or going to work, when they graduate HS, and inform the local congregations in those areas that said youth are incoming there.. provide them with the name, email, address, and phone number, and get someone to contact them.
When I did this for the Heartland District, I had nearly 100% participation on the receiving congregations ends, and our youth were well taken care of, and retained.
You’re right though: the reason we don’t keep youth is because we don’t REALLY serve the needs of YAs in our congregations, and when we do decent YA work, our congregations tend to like it so much it gets co-opted as standard congregational work, and the YAs forced out of it.
When I was a delegate to GA last year, my congregation gave me instructions on whom to vote for for president, but on everything else gave me freedom to decide (yes, I managed to get a group together to discuss Peacemaking, and this year a small group to suggest changes fro the congregational poll [including title change to Creating Peace] based on what I was reading on the listserv). Our congregation has a sad tradition of not much involvement with the denomination, which a few of us are trying to change. When I talked about “individuals”, I was referring more to within congregations than at GA.
I don’t like lobbying at GA any more than I like lobbying in Congress. I agree that antiageism does not have the visibility of antiracism, and I agree that there should be more effort into being inclusive of all age groups.
I know that our RE director knows where all graduating youth who are going to college will be going; not sure how active we are in hooking them up with another congregation. Glad to say that some of our graduates who stay in the area continue to be involved at CUC.
Yes, I am guilty of being an aging hippie-wannabe (just a few years too young). but I don’t want to be automatically lumped in with the rest of my age group, any more than I would want to be automatically lumped in with all women, or all whites, or. . . you get the point.
I think that there is a natural drift away from religion in one’s late teens/early 20s—the questioning years—and a return when children enter the picture. I do think it is worth the effort to stay connected, though, and find ways to keep that age group interested.
Great point! And I blogged on youth & young adults together because that was the UUGA 2010 Resolution wording, brought by youth caucus and the young adult caucus. There’s also two major age groups in young adults: 18-25-ish and 25-ish-35-ish when there are rather different spiritual formation issues. Because young adult groups, if they exist at all, can be so small in our communities, the tendency is to lump and treat as the same. But if we’re truly ministering with and to, we need to acknowledge and work with the different strengths and spiritual places for all three different ages — youth and the two phases of young adulthood.
A possibly more acceptable reason for more resources going to Youth may be just that we Older Adults simply _perceive_ them as _needing_ more organized support. After all, they have fewer resources of their own, much less freedom and mobility; they didn’t choose to be born in UU families, they’re more or less stuck with us, which makes them more of a responsibility. (Plus, they stand out more, visually. Smaller, generally, for one thing. ) This is not to detract from the excellent points you make; just another angle…
Kinsi, a major factor in why congregations (and, by extension, the UUA) support youth more than young adults is that, by and large, the parents of the youth are active members of the congregation.
Most UU young adults don’t live in the communities where they grew up, and don’t have other adults who feel responsible for them or deeply connected to them. As you point out, many of us joined Unitarian Universalism in young adulthood. And many young adults are transient, moving every year or two. It takes tremendous intentionality from older adults to invest in support for young adults because so many of the deep assumptions about congregational life are tied up with families and long-term attachments to a particular place.
I saw this as a young adult leader in an urban congregation that really did embrace me and support young adults not just for the five years I was there, but for many years after I left—and I saw how almost completely absent young adults were in the large suburban congregation where I was the youth advisor a few years later.
I wonder if maybe Young adults could make contributions to our congregations, if our congregations were more understanding of our finaicle limitations? I am not an active advocate of all young adults being combined, as i strongly feel that Campus Ministry and Young adults are different groups needing different aspects of the church. However, with this in mind why does the UUA not allow for different pricing options for young adults at things like GA? If youth need a finaicle break i firmly believe that Young Adults in this economy also need a break. I also would like to know why Churches can’t make a split in regards to RE if we have Children, Youth and Adult RE could’nt we split the Adult RE into Young adult RE and foster Young adults to teach to other young adults about our faith?