Blog Post

Setting & Population:

I am focusing on middle and high school age youth within a church youth group community. The hope for this project is to understand how the students in the youth group have been handling the variables of the pandemic, what they are in need of socially, emotionally, and psychologically, and what their stress and anxiety levels look like currently as they relate to COVID-19. The youth group/church community I am partnering with is one that I was a part of as a child and adolescent, a Christian church in Middletown, Kentucky. I feel as though my connection to the youth group will allow for a positive experience for those involved in the youth group today. I spoke with the youth minister for the interview portion of the project. He served as a youth group volunteer when I was in the youth group, and now serves as the youth minister. He and I have a long-standing relationship, and he has served as a mentor to me for many years. Through my interview with him, I discovered new information about the youth he works with, the parents of those youth, and their emotions surrounding the current world dynamic.

Interview/background:

According to the youth minister, the youth are craving connection with one another, and in-person human interaction in general. The students miss each other, their friends, and their former daily activities. I expected him to also discuss the anxiety levels of his students, but he said students have actually not been showing many signs of increased anxiety and have been approaching the changes in normalcy with poise. A unique perspective that the youth minister shared, however, was that the students seem to be handling things better than their parents. The parents, according to him, have been speaking out about things they want and need for their children, which includes a place for them to foster relationships. The youth minister is doing his best to create this community, but by following safety measures and precautions that must occur for the foreseeable future. He transitioned to an online model for youth group when the pandemic began in the spring and has now brought back a revised in-person youth group model by following social-distancing guidelines, mask wearing, and by keeping the groups small. This in-person model has been able to fill the students’ needs of positive interaction. But it still remains “weird” as it is out of the norm of what past years has looked like, following “COVID-friendly” rules. The youth group cannot gather together as one whole body, therefore causing relationships to be missed and a further craving for these friendships to continually grow.

Goals:

With my project, I hope to approach the goals of community cultivation and socialization through musical resources I can provide the youth and their families to use together. These goals are important to this community as they may help the students grow in their ability to connect and share with others, communicate effectively, and practice vulnerability, even in a pandemic. We are all in need of positive social interactions, and ways to connect that are safe and keep ourselves and others healthy. While I cannot offer resources to cultivate in-person activities, I can provide resources that approach goals of community cultivation and socialization through musical platforms such as Spotify. Spotify allows for premium members to create collaborative playlists, with each user having the function to add their own song selections to it. This may be something I can utilize as a resource for them, with providing students access to shared premium accounts and creating guidelines for individual’s participation. Students can add songs to playlists they create together, and each contribute to a project they can enjoy from the safety of their homes. Similarly, I can create playlists that assist with studying, help in stress reduction, and create worship playlists for them to listen to on their own and with small groups. I also hope to create guidelines for musical activities for students to do with their families or small groups, such as song rewrites utilizing a user-friendly “mad-lib” format. I hope to refine my ideas and begin organizing playlists as well as musical interventions that the students and families can do within small groups together to cultivate community and promote socialization.