Second Saturday

Last Saturday we re-instituted a YES!Atlanta tradition. For the first time in more than a year, we invited all Coaching for Success participants together for a group session. Mary Mitchell, one of YES!Atlanta’s co-founders and a recent addition to the board of directors, facilitated the session.

Mary insisted on students’ participation and engagement from the outset. Once everyone had stood in front of the group and announced their name, grade, and school, she told the teens the first order of business would be to read through and discuss a set of five basic ground rules for Second Saturday sessions.

Mary made it clear that she’d be seeking a volunteer to read each of the rules, and, anticipating that most of the teens would wait for someone else to step forward, promised the first volunteer the chance to read the shortest rule.

A quiet seventh-grader among a mostly high school-aged group, Mike would have topped my board as the odds-on favorite to resist participating the longest. But he quickly reminded me that I am a nonprofit executive, not a handicapper. Buoyed by Mary’s promise that the early bird would get off relatively easy, he practically jumped out of his seat to read rule 1: Be on time.

This rule was a good entry point for the morning’s conversation about the importance of keeping commitments. We had announced a start time of 10 a.m., but the last of the participants didn’t arrive until almost 10:30.

Mary had confided in me beforehand that the students would get a free pass—this time—on rule 1. Good thing. The way a few of our teens came in made me wonder how they make it to school early in the morning five days a week. My first glance at a particularly bleary-eyed girl reminded me of a teen truism once set out for me by a program participant: “There’s no such thing as a Saturday morning.”

It was slow going at first, as the rules of engagement were set and re-set. Mary had to remind students at nearly every exchange that she expected them to raise their hand to be acknowledged, stand while speaking, and acknowledge others’ contributions.

If you’ve spent much time with teens, you can probably imagine the non-verbal cues they were giving out to display their resistance to the format—loud sighs, rolling eyes, contorted posture, and a pace of movement more befitting residents at a senior center than students in senior high school.

The change started taking root maybe ten minutes into the session. One by one, as they reached the conclusion that Mary was going to stick to her guns, the teens began complying with the ground rules and genuinely engaging in the conversation. What started as one or two outliers quickly developed into a majority, and voilà—the beginnings of a mutually supportive peer group.

It’s a delicate seedling at this point, but I expect it’ll flourish with the right tending. That’s what Second Saturdays are for.