Book Review: Youth Change Agent: Empower a Young Person to Make the Transition to a Better Life
by Keith Strickland and Lucas L. Johnson II
Broadleaf Books (Jun 04, 2024)
Paperback, 142 pages
Nonfiction
Book Reviewed by Shaundale Rénā
In a time when phrases like “inner child” and “mental wellness” have become common in discussions of personal growth, Keith Strickland’s Youth Change Agent: Empower a Young Person to Make the Transition to a Better Life stands out as an essential and timely read. The book begins with the author surviving an attempted robbery and ends with one of his mentees now in prison, highlighting the stark realities many young people face. Strickland’s work is both profoundly relevant and urgently needed. We have all experienced, in some way, life not going the way we planned or wanted.
Whether it was an unreceived Christmas present in our childhood and or the occasional parental “no” to attend a friend’s birthday party or a school event, there is little doubt the incident stung and likely etched the proverbial childhood wound or emotional scar. But imagine childhood trauma as a way of life, where safety is fleeting, and the necessities of life are often lacking. That’s what came to mind many times while reading this book. I imagined an environment where no child feels safe, and the only way to experience “love” or to gain “respect” is through crime.
What are the choices a young person can make when Dad is incarcerated, and Mom is mentally incapacitated? When a sibling is murdered, or a friend joins a gang for survival? When life is hard for seemingly no reason except your family struggles with disadvantages and lacks opportunities, or the neighborhood where you live is dangerous? For some it’s crime, drugs, and hopelessness; for others, it’s motivation to get out and be the change they need to live. Strickland is part of both dynamics, and he uses his story to help others to become change agents and aims to connect them with the youth in need of changing.
By Strickland’s definition and example, “A change agent is the person who comes into a youth’s life and seeks to change what they believe. ... A change agent changes what the youth sees as possible. A change agent also changes what seems normal, what’s acceptable, and what’s not. A change agent adjusts what seems negative and what type of energy youth want around them or want to produce.”
It is this intentionality that makes the greatest impact and leaves the biggest impression on young minds. And based on Strickland’s ideas in Youth Change Agent: Empowering a Young Person to Make the Transition to a Better Life, “When a change agent gives a child a reason to have hope, they give them the ability to build an unlimited number of blocks for themself!” This is the main reason I enjoyed reading Youth Change Agent. It is a blueprint. There is a process, and the author isn’t shy about telling his.
An ex-offender and former drug dealer, Strickland shares his own “code,” of sorts, a code that led him to the realization of one of the most influential takeaways for me: “The Impact of Negative Exposure.” In this section, Strickland writes, “I had a custom …I didn’t bring drugs around children.” He then recounts an incident when he and another dealer were preparing for a sale and the guy’s four-year-old son unexpectedly entered the room. This is why page 31 simply has a dogear with one word: Wow. Talk about the wrong kind of influence!
Later he writes: “Let’s face it: The children a change agent is working with may have never had a person in their life that had their best interest in mind, or it may be so uncommon, that they don’t believe that a person could truly care about them that way. A change agent may have the best intentions, but in the beginning of the relationship with the child, the change agent is the only person who knows that.”
Although I enjoyed the overall material in Youth Change Agent, what I did not like was the repetitiveness of some points. Instead of the occasional “remember” or “don’t forget,” there is a constant redundancy that some readers may find unnecessary. “Some youth have experienced abandonment” is a true statement that could have been mentioned fewer times. Likewise, “I built a relationship with the oldest son” mimics “as a result of the connection we built,” and “I was able to connect with him,” all on the same page. The same goes for telling readers “Incarceration has two main goals. The first is to separate dangerous people from innocent members of society” in one chapter and then stating “The criminal justice system is designed to identify people who are threats to society” in the following one. As a reader who likes to be trusted to get it the first time, I didn’t need the tediousness that came with these repeated statements.
Each chapter opens with an uplifting quote to encourage and empower the reader, and are worth remembering and sharing. If there is anything I would like to have seen more of, it is numbered Key First Steps. Each chapter ends with a Key First Step; however, I don’t believe they can all be first. The idea is likely to take a series of “First Steps” to start your journey to becoming a youth change agent. However, as Strickland shares, just as “a change agent cannot free someone from something they won’t release,” I’m saying you cannot free someone from something you’re not free from yourself. So, I recommend reading this book if you are someone who has a heart for youth and are even half-way interested in empowering them to make the transition to a better life. But particularly if you have the experience and/or testimony, Youth Change Agent is the read you’ve been searching for.
Keith Strickland is an activist, speaker, and educator who has developed courses that are taught in schools across the nation, impacting the lives of more than 100,000 youth and young adults. He is the founder and CEO of Making the Transition Inc., an agency that works with inner-city youth and young adults. He has dedicated his adult life to preventing youth from taking wrong paths—similar ones he took—and continues to empower lives and change the world, one youth at a time. Lucas L. Johnson II, who collaborated on the book, is a former reporter for The Associated Press, where he worked for more than twenty years mainly covering politics, education, and prison reform. He is the author of Finding the Good and now works in education and has taught high school and college students.
Strickland’s personal story will challenge you to look deep within and pull out what you have and start from there. He was facing a prison sentence by twenty-seven. All he knew then was the streets, and that’s how he lived until faced with a choice between positive and negative beliefs. Because Strickland chose to do something different, something better, Youth Change Agent gives us all a glimpse into the harsh reality of a life of crime and equips us with transferable tools that show our youth “anything is possible.” These hopes teeter on the Development Exercises and the Resources and Tools offered on the ending pages, assets that allow each willing participant to begin to transform their own life and then to connect with other change agents throughout the world.