Unashamed Tour to hit LA

New Harvest Church in Norwalk, CA will host 116 Clique’s “Unashamed Tour” on July 26th. The tour features LeCare, Trip Lee, Tedashii, and Sho Baraka (see artists bios). Rob Pene (yes, THAT Rob Pene) e-mailed in to tell us the following: “We are hosting a Ministry Event 7.26.08 featuring one of your speakers from the last UYWI conference, Lecrae and his Reach Records artist. Would love to have UYWI get involved in some way, and get this information to the Youth Workers in the near counties.”

Rob, you got your wish. You can find out more about the tour… here.

Crossover Tampa needs a Children’s Director

and we have several other job openings posted from around the nation for urban-minded people who love Jesus and need a job doing what they’re passionate about. So click the link, read through the openings, and connect with the contact to move your career in urban ministry forward.

Staff Profiles Online

We’ve asked the UYWI staff a series of questions and put them online as extended profiles. So now if you wanted to know where Fred Oduyoye went to school, what John Lewis’s most unusual job was, or what Julie Herrick does when she’s not working, now you can find out. Right now we have 13 of our 16 full-time staff profiles up, but hopefully we’ll eventually have them all up so you can get to know us all better.

America’s Disappearing Fathers

I ran across this article today while researching fatherless and divorce fallout statistics in the midwest. It appears the National Center for Health Statistics has some recent national research to show some dramatic numbers in this area. These are the finding based on the Wall Street Journal article:

The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is 38%. Among white children, 28% are now born to a single mother; among Hispanic children it is 50% and reaches a chilling, disorienting peak of 71% for black children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly a quarter of America’s white children (22%) do not have any male in their homes; nearly a third (31%) of Hispanic children and over half of black children (56%) are fatherless.”

read the full article here.

Youth Favor TV and Web

“During a typical week, teens spend an average of 12.5 hours, up from 10.7 hours last year. ‘Tweens spend an average of 6.5 hours online, compared to 5.2 hours last year.”

A June 19th study from research firm Youth Trends finds that mobile, web, and TV usage among teens and “tweens” is on the rise. Data is collected and reported on every 6 months and information from the winter is available here, and the recent report information were brought to light in a mediaweek article. The actual Youth Trends report is only available to subscribers, but many of the general figures can be found online in other recent articles.

here’s another recent article with statistics from a Nielson Online Video Census - “Teens Biggest Users of Online Video”

Lives Worth Saving Gang Summit

I arrived at Santa Ana College at 7 am this last Saturday to be a part of a year long collaboration between Orange County Juvenile Probation, Catholic and Protestant Detention, UYWI and some other gang specialist organizations. We hosted almost 200 leaders for the “Lives Worth Saving” Gang Summit. It was truly a day to remember for all of us involved. Our goal was to bring awareness of the gang issues facing Orange County and let the faith community here from our civic leaders that they are in need a help. The number of teenagers locked up currently in Orange County for murder or attempted murder is 73, which has risen from 50 when our collaboration started. The room was alive with energy as people shared best practices, challenged the faith community to partner with probation and laid out small and large steps to becoming part of the solution. This was a landmark day, but as a part of the faith community it is our responsibility to not let this end here, but to be determined to do what is necessary to reach out to save lives that are so worth saving before they become another statistic in the system and leave another family victimized in the community.

Next week, we host another training on working with gangs and are developing a network of gang specialists that will be offering practical classes and relationships to increase the number of people in the faith community who are equipped to make a difference. Please let us know if you are interested in more training on this issue as we move forward together.

TechMission Year-Long Internship Added to JobList

If you’re looking for experience in after-school programs, teen programs, volunteer coordination, technology, web development, editing, and such, and have a year of your life to put into such a calling, then one of the opportunities at TechMission may be for you. Additionally, there are a number of other opportunities for employment in other cities and areas of the country which may appeal to you more. Find out about all of these by clicking here and viewing UYWI’s JobList.

UYWI08 featured shirts online

With the exception of the green uywi.org “roots” shirt, all of the other “featured” shirts sold at UYWI08 have hit the online store. Supplies are limited! We did a second run of the “Living the Legacy” shirts (both mens and womens cut), but at this point have no plans to do any further runs of this shirt. The new Mission shirt and the black RELOAD shirt also have landed, and also being added to the store are the UYWI edition of the Student Venture Playbook and Rudy Carrasco’s Protest and Invest books. Click here to see the new shirts and browse the store.