Message from Our Director

If you set high expectations of our youth they will rise to the challenge.  By building true partnership with young people, we can ultimately move into the direction of accepting Youth as our Partners.  This is where adults respect young people as having something significant to offer, recognizing the greater impact youth bring to out programs.

Youth-Adult Partnership is one that integrates youth's realistic perspectives and skills with professional adults' experience and wisdom.  Itoffers each party the opportunity to make suggestions and decisionswhile recognizing and valuing the contribution of each other. 

We do not often think about where our next drink of water will come from, we think of the above statement only when our lives become disrupted and for some reason, we have to curtail our use of water on a daily basis.  The 2^nd World Water Forum had this as one of the key messages to be shared with all sectors: government decision makers, businesses, communities and each of us as individuals - water IS our business.

While we do not currently have daily concerns about access to clean drinking water and sanitation systems, that is not the case for the rest of the world. Did you know that:

• 1.1 billion people live without clean drinking water
• 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation
• 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases, due to water borne illnesses

Across the world, inadequate access to water particularly affects the lives of women and female children, who have the responsibility to spend hours of the day walking to sources of water and transporting it back to their families.  In many countries, girls miss educational opportunities because the preponderance of their day is spent in search of water and because schools lack water and sanitation systems to respond to hygiene needs during puberty.

The After School Experience (TASE) is taking on the message of "Water is Everybody's Business" and is working to make our conferences "green" events. We are taking our first baby steps at this meeting, and look forward to your suggestions of more ways we can support this agenda.  We encourage you to think about this in your programs when you go back home, and how you can share this message with the children you serve.  We also encourage you to submit activities and lessons that can be used to help engage young people in the "green" message.  Stay tuned for updates in future issues of the newsletter, with ideas to use in your programs.