Youth Passions Research in Montreal

October 10, 2008 2:11 PM

If you had one year to dedicate yourself to researching how young people's passions and interests can be supported and encouraged, what would you do? Bonus points for Montreal-related responses.

I'm planning to apply to the Sauve Scholars program, a one-year fellowship based in McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where you are given full support and resources to research, study, and work on a project of your choice. I would like to use the year to come up with a project plan for resources that help young people find support for their passions and interests - mainly from a Malaysian perspective, as there's nothing there, but involving research into how young people are supported in other countries.

We need to come up with a plan for our project - what we want to investigate, how we're going to go about it, how we can use local resources to help us. With a topic like this, it can be pretty broad, so I'd like some ideas for actions I can take to support my research for this one year.
I'm planning to apply to the Sauve Scholars program, a one-year fellowship based in McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where you are given full support and resources to research, study, and work on a project of your choice. I would like to use the year to come up with a project plan for resources that help young people find support for their passions and interests - mainly from a Malaysian perspective, as there's nothing there, but involving research into how young people are supported in other countries.

We need to come up with a plan for our project - what we want to investigate, how we're going to go about it, how we can use local resources to help us. With a topic like this, it can be pretty broad, so I'd like some ideas for actions I can take to support my research for this one year.

If you had one year to dedicate yourself to researching how young people's passions and interests can be supported and encouraged, what would you do?

What sort of research would you do? Who would you want to look up? Where would you volunteer or work? I don't expect specific names (Though that'd be great!!) but things like "You should look up what their relevant youth policy is and find government agencies that work with young people" or "Find a Malaysian Students Society to interview" are the things I'm after. If you've worked in a venture that does exactly this (support young people's passions), what sort of work did you do to form and maintain your venture?

I've been getting a lot of "ask the young people themselves", which is what I'm doing too, but that's not something I need the fellowship to do. I'm more interested in finding out what resources are available in Montreal/McGill that I can tap into.

posted by divabat to education (5 answers total)

Some thoughts off the top of my head:

(1) Know the terrain. If you want to be Montreal-specific, for example, it helps to know that Quebec has a Minister of Culture , which runs a number of programs to encourage youth participation in the arts. Also, the educational ,system is slightly different from what you may be accustomed to, so there might be different opportunities to target youth.

(2) Helping support the "passions and interests" is, as you acknowledge, extremely broad. It would be useful for you to narrow this down as much as possible, even if you have to arbitrarily decide on something. Most programs target some specific passion - the arts, music, volunteering, traveling, teaching, technology, etc. - and its often good to be as specific as possible in an application.

(3) Also, you should try to be as specific as possible about what you mean by "support." This could mean giving young people money to spend on their passion; or giving them opportunities to network, intern, or work with adults who engage in their interests; or teaching them skills that will help them pursue their interests; or providing technological support for their interests; or something else. Narrowing this down will also help you narrow down the range of people & programs in Montreal that you can look up.

Also: if you do make it to Montreal, feel free to drop us a line!
posted by googly at 2:56 PM on October 10, 2008

If it were me, I would be interested in understanding internal motivation at that age and how to amplify and direct it. Then combining that with skills for implementing the ideas that pour out from the motivation.

Ideas are great and passion is great but knowing how to execute a plan will separate the dreamers from the doers.

This would serve any ethnic group in pretty much any situation or area of interest.
posted by trinity8-director at 3:37 PM on October 10, 2008

The mayor has just vowed $2.2 million to improve libraries and build soccer fields in Montreal North because it's suddenly on the radar that kids there are joining gangs and turning to the dark side at least partly from general social neglect. Go up there, actually talk to the kids, find out what else they're missing.
posted by zadcat at 5:03 PM on October 10, 2008

I would look at what BUILD.org is doing and base my project on ways to mirror that in other underserved communities.
posted by DarlingBri at 5:46 PM on October 10, 2008

I'd look at ways to get all young people more individual attention from adults in their community who could help them. Not necessarily money, or a big brother/big sister program, either. Rather, what do young people need that they could get from time with adults? What's preventing them from having that time, or those kinds of adults? Is there existing research in this direction?
posted by amtho at 8:44 PM on October 10, 2008