Teen Outreach Programs (TOPs) offers exciting and stimulating recreation-based opportunities for teens ages 12-18 in the City of Raleigh at no cost. Staff members are typically volunteers, with the exception of the program managers. TOPs are offered at 10 different facilities throughout Raleigh, but individual programs can take place anywhere in the community. TOPs provides, or can gain access to, almost any and all equipment or supplies needed for programming by coordinating with other City of Raleigh facilities and resources.
There are three main full-time staff members that work to maintain the program and sites. Chiffonda Holloway, Kent Hunt, and Carmen Myles are the program managers that develop new programs for each site, handle any issues that may arise with volunteers or students, and network with other programs and community members to gain support. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with all three while planning our programs for our class.
The goal of the program is to provide a positive and engaging environment for teens, while also providing them with mentoring relationships. These relationships can help address issues that affect teens, their community, and their environment. The program also teaches teens how to be active and beneficial members of the Raleigh community. The program's ultimate desired outcome is to connect teens in an engaging way so they can be positive role models in the community.
Since the program is coordinated through the City of Raleigh, it is a publicly funded program that is free to any teen aged 12-18. In order to participate, teens must fill out an application and have it signed by a parent/guardian. After the application is on file, teens may participate as often or as little as they please. The City of Raleigh takes pride in having this type of program offered specifically for teens, and they continually try to expand and enhance it.
See appendix for flyer about TOPs and its locations.
TOPs provides a safe place for teens aged 12-18 to go after school. The program allows any teen to participate, as long as they submit an application signed by their parent/guardian. Although their general target market is all teens within the Raleigh area, the more centralized target market are teens from low-income families who may not have parental/guardian supervision available immediately after school due to them being at work.
Our group focused on reaching out to specific TOPs sites around the community. Throughout the locations, there are very different environments and cultures that can be experienced. The sites we chose to work with were those that were in typically low-income neighborhoods, and where more male middle school aged youth came to participate. We felt that if we targeted these general characteristics at certain sites, then we could gain more participation and overall excitement in our programs.
In order to make sure we created the best programs for our target market, we researched age group characteristics that we could take into consideration while planning our programs. The first characteristics we focused on was social and emotional characteristics of these young adolescents. We learned that this age group depends on their peer group to develop their identity, and therefore it would be very important that we hold each teen accountable for their actions. By doing so, the teens could influence each other in a positive way and build a positive identity. Another characteristic we learned from this group is that they are sensitive to their appearance. This made us really second guess our stations that we created for our first program - we needed to ensure that we were not embarrassing the teens too much, because if they felt embarrassed, they would not want to participate. Another area we focused on was physical characteristics. One aspect we tried to incorporate into our programs was early teens enjoying cooperative and competitive games. We made our programs friendly yet competitive to target this specific characteristic of their age group. Finally, we focused on the age group's cognitive characteristic of being able to plan ahead and organize tasks with little or no help from adults. In order to incorporate this into our programs, we made sure to leave some of the instructions up for interpretation so that they could use these cognitive skills in the programs. Overall, our careful consideration into the teens' group characteristics helped our programs to be a success.